Godard Between Identity and Difference 9781628928761

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Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a strange experience. I've written it in the cracks and corners of my daily life over the past three years, never quite having the days on end for composition that have always played, and even still play, such a prominent role in my academic fantasy life. In reality, though, pages and notes toward pages were written between classes, waiting for friends at a cafe, in the morning before my beloveds awakened, and so on. That said, the ideas in this book have a long genesis. The ideas and analyses in this book intersect a cluster of films by Jean- Luc Godard with the work of philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. That intersection has two origins. The first, of course, is my encounter with Godard. I want to thank my many students from Grand Valley State University and Assumption College. They endured my often opaque treatments of inaccessible films (what a terrible double!), but always gave me much to think about in conversation. In particular, Colleen Vasquez, Geoffrey Manzi, Justin Pettibone, Amber Young, Kelley Gill, Pennie Alger, Jillian Canode, and Gabriel Arce-Rollins (at Amherst College)thank you for patience and insight. 1 mean that. There is also the work of Levinas and Derrida. In many ways, this book is my attempt to begin reckoning with that philosophical relationship. That relationship brings me back to texts, yes, but mostly to my own most important philosophical relationship: Robert Bernasconi's long, original, and profound meditations on the problems of difference, deconstruction, and responsibility. As a research assistant in 1992 and 1993, I read a thick pile of his manuscripts on Levinas and Derrida-some published, some unpublishedand I've not yet left the challenge of that conceptual space. Since that time, I've wanted to write a book on Levinas and Derrida. Through Godard's films, I've done a little bit of work toward that book here, and a lot of it feels like an occasional footnote to Bernasconi's much more serious encounters with Levinas and Derrida. Thanks, Robert, for giving me that primary commentary. There is also some of the less-glamorous work of composing a book. The folks at Amherst Coffee, where a lot of this was written, deserve big thanks for letting me sit there for so many hours. For real. It would have been completely ix

Preface

I have been thinking about Jean-Luc Godard's work for a good bit of time. The pages that follow assemble a conceptual story about that work, bringing my thinking and watching to some sort of philosophical articulation. Like so many folks, I suspect, my thinking about Godard began with real affection-and maybe no small bit of fanboyism-for his flair and style. Let's be honest: Godard is cool, and it comes across in the aesthetic of so many films. I loved, and still do love, that part of his work. As it turns out, though, this book is not about those films that first drew me to Godard. This book is actually about some of the least flaired and styled of his films-namely, those quirky essay-films from the seventies that read more like philosophy than cool posturing. (For some of us, actually, those two aren't so far apart.) In those films from the seventies, Godard establishes himself as a philosopher in a number of senses, most notably in his sense of language and how to pose a conceptual dilemma. It is remarkable that, despite that work and indeed his lifetime of serious filmmaking, Godard has barely registered in philosophical circles. And philosophy, as I will argue, has missed an important resource for thinking about some of the most trying, even impossible, aporias that animate contemporary ethics, politics, and epistemology. Philosophy needs Godard. Godard also needs a philosophical reading. I have also been thinking very seriously about the problem of difference since my graduate school seminars with Robert Bernasconi, Len Lawlor, and John Llewelyn in the early nineties. In particular, I have been thinking about how difference poses such a profound challenge to language. The challenge is seemingly impossible to address or even negotiate. Difference asks so much of us while at the very same time it takes away the words with which we might respond. Emmanuel Levinas's work on this set of questions is my first inspiration, and Jacques Derrida's initial critiques in the sixties, then seeming embrace and extension of Levinas in the late eighties and nineties, has only deepened my engagement with the problem of difference. Although the appeal of problems of deconstruction and the like have faded just a bit in the fashionista circles of academia, I think, following Levinas, that the problem of difference and the responsibilities that come with it are constitutive of our very being in xi

Introduction: Cinema as a Kind of Philosophy

On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language. -Bazin In "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" Jacques Ranciere undertakes an important and crucial intervention in the problem of representation. This intervention is "important and crucial" because in it lies not only a particularly pressing contemporary issue (a certain obsession with liminal experience) but the very terms of philosophy's future life. Or lack thereof. To posit or explore the end of philosophy is, of course, nothing new, but the problem of the unrepresentable makes a special kind of claim against philosophy. If the unrepresentable "represents:' as it were, the failure of our capacity to grasp, understand, and comprehend, then philosophy's future as the life of bringing to knowledge-that fabled "love of wisdom"-is put in serious question. If not altogether slain. For if the long twentieth century is a long story of catastrophic trauma and loss, then the task of thinking after and in pursuit of that century is borne by the unrepresentable. Philosophy, rooted in historical experience, is confronted with just that task of thinking. And so the unrepresentable marks an important, even decisive crossroads for philosophy. Ought philosophy retain its aloofness and survey history from the traditional nunc stans? Or is philosophy called to address the gaps, breaks, and fissures brought to historical experience by the pain of the world? Here is where the unrepresentable provokes philosophy. At this moment, and in this encounter with history, what is philosophy's future-both as a method and as a language? The unrepresentable preoccupies contemporary philosophy for this very reason. Not only is something urgent at stake (How are we to reckon with historical experience?), but also the primal question of philosophy's very possibility (Does philosophy maintain its inner character?). Yet with these questions, for Ranciere, we are already in a contrary-if not contradictory-space, asking for an ultimate stake (rationality) and argument (systematicity) where, at least in principle, no such stake or argument should obtain. The unrepresentable, Ranciere argues, no matter its affective appeal, is a case of hyperbole masked as a stark and grave imperative. He writes, Stricto sensu, this idea is vacuous. It simply expresses a wish: the paradoxical desire that, in the very regime which abolishes the

Chapter One

The Other on Loan: Two or Three Things I Know about Her

Maybe, if the film comes off ... maybe then will be revealed what MerleauPonty calls the 'singular existence' of a person-Juliette's in particular. -Godard, on Two or Three Things I Know about Her The face is a conceptless experience. -Levinas All the classical concepts interrogated by Levinas are thus dragged toward the agora, summoned to justify themselves in an ethico-political language that they have not always sought-or believed they sought-to speak, summoned to transpose themselves into this language by confessing their violent aims. Yet they already spoke this language in the city, and spoke it well .... -Derrida Two or Three Things I Know about Her was released in 1966, a year-plus before the spectacular political events of 1968 in France and near the height of the u.s. war in Vietnam. In terms of Godard's politics-no matter the stage of development, both are always central-this is a potent moment in which to make a film. One would certainly expect a political tract from Godard in that moment, and we get those films with Week-end, La Chinoise, and of course Loin de Vietnam. With his Two or Three Things, however, we do not only see Godard the political commentator, satirical or otherwise. Wheeler Dixon is right in observing that, in this film, we get our first sight of Godard the philosopher.' Godard elevates his theoretical sophistication in Two or Three Things; the film is considerably more difficult than its predecessors. And with Godard as philosopher, we also get a cluster of themes-language, prostitution, domesticity, death, the pain of the world-that continue to dominate his work throughout the seventies. This cluster of themes overload the film. Indeed, Two or Three Things says more than the film can handle, insofar as Godard begins a series of meditations that far exceed the boundaries of a single film, opening up a decade's

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Chapter Two

Dead Time and the Image in

lei et ailleurs

... it didn't invent horror, it just churned out thousands of copies. -Godard, on the twentieth century This revelation of distance destroys ....

IS

an ambiguous revelation, for time -Levinas

We are wondering about the meaning of a necessity: the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it. -Derrida Godard's engagement with ethical cinema, as we are calling it here, is initiated by the blending of fiction and nonfiction. In the case of Two or Three Things I Know about Her, the motif of singular existence begins with the strange and largely unresolved relation of Martina Vlady (the actress) and Juliette Janson (the character), which begins a longer meditation on how language as direct description (the nonfictional aspiration) is complicit with the image (the fictional compromise). In this schematic, Godard is charged with crafting his way from the fictional to a sense of the documentary, from the figurative to the concrete. The impasses are many. In the present chapter, however, we will discuss how Godard reverses his task. The failed documentary-a failure in the most interesting and fecund sense-lei et ailleurs (1975) charges Godard with a different craft: movement from the loss of the documentary image to its recovery in the element of the fictional. If all of the others are dead, which is precisely the loss that begins lei et ailleurs, then there is no nonfictional voice with which to struggle against the moment of fiction in cinematic creation. The ruin must be crafted to speak. This movement makes special demands on cinematic language. How is one to bring what has been lost, and remains only as a ruin, to a new presence? What is this singularity? And how does that singularity configure the responsibility of the auteur?

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Chapter Three

The Cinematic Empiricism of Comment ~a va?

The gaze, the gaze ... it is nothing. -Godard But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights. -Levinas There are impossible, illegible, or forbidden narratives: for example, the one I won't tell you, and I won't even tell you whether it is motivated by the image or whether it corresponds to what that image declares, the untellable or unrepresentable itself. In short, all of that cannot be told. The order is discreet, reserved, difficult to decipher but all the more intractable .... -Derrida It is really nothing remarkable to say that responsibility is for the living. After all, the suffering of others unsettles us in our very being, compelling us internally to act with goodness and justice in mind and hand. But responsibility is also demanded for the dead, perhaps especially for the dead. In lei et ailleurs, as we have seen in chapter 2, this responsibility for the dead compels Godard to compose a melancholic image. Godard composes that image melancholic because, halted as it was by the peculiar logic of the elsewhere, Godard was unable to gather the proximity necessary for mourning. That distance-elsewhere-that is not separation in proximity, but nonetheless obligates me, us. Without his voice to tell me his sorrows and the destiny of that sadness, there is only the corpse. There is only melancholia. And so there is only the unsaying of the said in a melancholic image. Godard's Comment ~a va? (1976; released 1978), a collaboration with AnneMarie Mieville and released just a few years following lei et ailleurs, revisits this 61

Chapter Four

Second, Third: Numero Deux

But doesn't the male lover keep asking the beloved woman to efface an original wound of which she would be the bearer? -Irigaray As I listened I was nonetheless wondering whether I, me, was comprehended, and how to stop that word: comprehended. And how the work knew me, what it knew of me. -Derrida When the delegate makes a speech, he reads the words of others. I think it's the paper that gives orders and that's the trouble. -Godard Before we are even introduced to the title of the film, Godard's Numero Deux (1975) introduces us to a working-class married couple, Sandrine and Pierre, alongside the following terms: MON TON SON IMAGE The terms are typed out and spaced on a blank, black computer screen. In the upper left corner is a video monitor playing a shot of a man riding his bike on a side street. The right side of the screen is a larger monitor with Pierre's face, then Sandrine's. Their expressions are ambivalent. In many ways, the entirety of the film is right there: the question of the relationship between "my," "your," and "his" in the making of images, both the images for our cinematic consideration and the images Sandrine has of herself, infused as they are with Pierre's violent and ciphering labor against her. For Godard, the meaning and significance of his film work on women is about to undergo heady self-critique.

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Godard Between Identity and Difference

I Godard's concern with women-specifically, women's bodies-tells us a long and important story about his relationship to his own filmmaking. Three films stand out as points of transformation: Vivre sa vie, Numero Deux, and Hail Mary. While the focus of the present chapter is the aesthetic and political strategies of Numero Deux, it is worth sketching a sense of Godard's movement through these three films about women. Vivre sa vie is a film about Nana, played by Anna Karina, and her "descent" into a life of prostitution. The film is Godard's third featurelength film, and so it lies at something like a transition point, connected with the iconic feel of Breathless while also anticipating in form and content much of what is to come in the considerably more heady and radical seventies. In this interval-place, Vivre sa vie works with a whole cluster of aesthetic features and innovations, most in the service of drawing our attention to Karina's spectacularly beautiful face. For that reason, Vivre sa vie struggles to maintain a coherent politics in its absorption in the aesthetic. The beautiful complicates politics, if only for beauty's effect of distraction from the conceptual challenge the film sets for itself-albeit an ambiguous challenge, as noted in chapter 1. So is the risk Godard takes in making politics across women's bodies. That said, Godard's use of the image of Karina's face is not without qualification. Nor are we as spectators above suspicion, for we consume; "we" sit as subjects in relation to what is offered, perhaps as a temptation only, as an object. Indeed, the maxim from Michel de Montaigne that frames the film at the close of the opening credits sets up both the stakes, and ultimately, the failure of the film. "It is necessary to lend oneself to others and give oneself to oneself" -Godard quotes Montaigne. As a film about prostitution, then, Vivre sa vie is a film about the problematic relation between self and other, even to the point of configuring self and other on the model of spectator-image. That is, Vivre sa vie is a film about filmmaking-in particular, a film about the act of filming. Filming commits the filmmaker to an act of prostitution, the argument of the film goes, by purchasing the person as an image at the moment the camera frames and captures in representation. Montaigne's maxim, then, is really about the paradox of violence at the heart of representation: to put Karina on the screen is to render her, with the camera's eye and frame, as Nana-a character, a theoretical site, an image. l The real question becomes this: How well has Godard's announcement of this paradox labored against the violence to which it has drawn our attention? Is it enough to allude, by way of Montaigne, to the prostituting exploitation inherent in the camera? Godard's answer-which, I want to argue, ought also to frame any reading of Numero Deux-is plain. The maxim alone is hardly sufficient. In fact, one could claim that the maxim effectively neutralizes any

Chapter Five

Histoire(s) of Memory

One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive. National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all. ... -Adorno [IJ t is often a matter of pretending to certify death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution. -Derrida To what extent can we characterize Godard's work as engaged in a kind ofhauntology? To be sure, the problem of death is central to his work, whether that death be the literal passing of colleagues in lci et ailleurs, the betrayal of life in the image in Comment ra va? or the loss of the feminine itself in Numero Deux. My reading of those films always came back, directly or indirectly, to a common motif: the ghost. The ghost of what appears on screen, if it haunts the images, changes how we understand the relation of cinematic language to the problem of heterology. Perhaps it is possible to say something about difference without violence, or at least with notably less violence, if we can only bring the ghost to the image. Godard's enormously ambitious Histoire(s) du cinema is his most haunted work. Godard engages a difficult, yet very important question: What does it mean to think cinema and the pain of the world at one and the same time? In that question, the concerns of the seventies are drawn into an encounter with the Other of history. What story can Godard tell about that Other? Can a story even be told? Or, can the story of history dedicated to the Other-that is, an ethical cinema thought in the enormity of history's weight-only be told as a hauntology? What is a haunted or hauntologicallanguage? And how does it reconfigure relations of language to cinema, of spectator to image, and so of desire, identification, and 116

Selected Bibliography

Albrecht, Thomas, "Sauve qui peut (L'image): Reading for a Double Life," Cinema Journal 30, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 61-73. Alter, Nora M., "Mourning, Sound, and Vision: Jean-Luc Godard's JLG/JLG;' Camera Obscura 44, no. 2 (2002): 75-103. Aumont, Jacques, "Godard: The View and the Voice:' Discourse no. 7 (Fall 1985 ): 42-65. Bachmann, Gideon, and Jean-Luc Godard, "The Carrots Are Cooked: A Conversation with JeanLuc Godard:' Film Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 13-19. Barr, Charles, The Films ofJean- Lue Godard. New York: Praeger, 1970. Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema? Volume I, trs. and ed. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Bellour, Raymond, and Mary Lea Bandy, eds., Jean-Lue Godard: Son + Image, 1974--1991. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992. Bersani, Leo, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. London: BFI, 2004. B1anchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation, trs. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Brown, Royal S., Focus on Godard. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Burgoyne, Robert, "The Political Topology of Montage: The Conflict of Genres in the Films of Godard;' Enclitic 7, no. 1 (1983): 14-23. Cannon, Steve, '''Not a Mere Question of Form': The Hybrid Realism of Godard's Vivre sa vie," French Cultural Studies 7 (October 1996): 283. Cannon, Steve, '''When You're Not a Worker Yourself .. :: Godard, the Dziga Vertov Group and the Audience:' in 100 Years of European Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, 100-108. Cerisuelo, Marc, Jean-Luc Godard. Paris: Quatre-Vents, 1989. Chin, Daryl, "'The Film That We Wanted to Live": Re-releasing Modernist Movies: PAj: A Journal of Performance and Art 69, no. 3 (September 200 I): 1-12. Choe, Youngjeen, "The Cinema of the Interstice: Jean- Luc Godard's Prenom Carmen and the Power of Montage," Quarterly Review of Film & Video 23 (April-June 2006): 111-127. Collet, Jean, Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Crown, 1970. Cunningham, Stuart, and R. Harley, "The Logic of the Virgin Mother;' Screen 28, no. 1 (1987): 62-76. De la Fuente, Quintin, and Flavia de la Fuente, "Jean-Luc Godard: A Child of the Museum of Cinema;' Cinema Scope no. 8 (2001): 32-34. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trs. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trs. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Del Rio, Elena, "Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau- Ponty;' SubStance 108, no. 3 (2005): 62-78. Derrida, Jacques, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trs. Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ---Aporias, trs. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

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