The Exorbitant Mirror: Violence, Disavowal, and the Logic of Terror in Michael Haneke's Das weiße Band

This article explores the nexus of violence, power, discipline, and disavowal in Michael Haneke's Das weiße Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon, 2009). Haneke's film shows how structures of power can produce countermeasures to their own authority while paradoxically disavowing the role they play in the oppositional forms of violence that emerge under their watch. This article illustrates how terrorism can flourish in a punitive society as a retributive mechanism to authoritarian rule and how the law of the punisher and the radical violence of the punished orbit a shared, co-constitutive imaginary.