Obscuring history: the ethics of uncertainty in Michael Haneke’s Caché

The concept of ‘opacity’ has recently been the object of scholarly attention, as the condition upon which an ethical relationship with the Self and the Other must be built. This article discusses two texts that mobilise opacity in different ways and towards different ends: Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s ‘Trilogie du Nord’/‘Exile Trilogy’ and Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché/Hidden. It argues that Haneke posits that historical opacity is the condition for an ethical relationship with the national past, whereas Céline contends that history is opaque to serve his own ideological agenda and negationist views. The goal of staging this confrontation between two very different authors is to highlight the political risks endemic to the concept of opacity.