Godard Between Identity and Difference

John E. Drabinski

• Editorial: Continuum
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441158482
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film Direction & Production

This book reads a series of Godard films as interventions in contemporary debate about the language of difference. Godard has something he wants both to preserve (singularity) and destroy (visual and aural totalitarianism). How is it possible to speak about the Other? How is it possible for the Other to speak? Does all speaking about or by the Other render that speaking common, thereby rendering what is different identical? These questions gather together a number of issues that cross and intersect disciplinary boundaries: signification, representation, ethics, politics, and so on.
The problematics with which Drabinski is concerned begin in the debate between Levinas and Derrida, then later in dialogue with Blanchot and Irigaray. To this extent, Godard is particularly well-suited as an interlocutor. Godard's work, especially in the 1970s, is itself a self-conscious form of philosophy. His films theorize themselves, produce a reflexive sound-image language, and so in many ways match the very essence of philosophy: thought thinking thought.
Still, the medium of sound and image complicates any rendering of Godard's work as philosophy. Godard produces a philosophically significant cinematic language, rather than simply narrating or representing philosophical ideas in the medium of film. And this language must be taken seriously in the context of the problem of difference. For, if difference is concerned with signification as such, then the visual and aural retain equal rights with writing (and all questions obtaining therein). Indeed, if part of the problem of speaking about or by the Other is how such speaking traffics in inscription, then cinematic language is certainly an important - and authentically complex - intervention in that problem.
The nature of the debate in this project - how the language of alterity is possible or impossible - immediately breaks disciplinary borders between philosophy, literary theory, film studies, and cultural studies. What it means to engage with film in this context, however, is complicated. To wit, there are two standard treatments of film in philosophy. Film is typically either an example of a philosophical position or philosophy is used to interpret motifs, characters, plot lines, etc. In neither case is film engaged as a form of philosophizing itself, that is, as a language engaged with philosophical problematics.
It is articulating exactly this engagement that this book takes as its primary task. The aim of the project is to read Godard's work as primary texts, with all the attention due the idiosyncratic language of those texts. Framed by the debate about difference and signification, these primary texts register and resonate as transformative interventions. The overarching argument of the book is that Godard's conception and practice of cinematic language opens new, important possibilities for thinking about radical alterity.

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 Merleau-Ponty 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.¹ 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 worth of reflection. That said, its articulation of the problem of alterity—our focus in this and subsequent chapters—is both provocative and systematic, opening up questions for which over a decade of work forms the beginnings of an answer. What do we mean by “Other”? How can alterity be brought to meaningful articulation? What are the limits and possibilities of cinematic language for this articulation? And, the most pressing ethical question: How is the Other made precarious in the world?

Let me begin with a simple statement: The problem of alterity is the problem of singularity. Alterity challenges how we understand the possibilities of making the singularity of another present in language with the least or most minimal violence. Alterity and singularity emerge as central to the problem of language as well, a complex problem to which we will return in detail later. Still, two comments from Two or Three Things are important at the outset. First, from Juliette, a remark on the intimacy of the question of language: “Language is the house man lives in.”² In this, Godard invokes Martin Heidegger’s famous remark in the 1947 “Letter on Humanism” that “language is the house of Being.” Godard avoids Heidegger’s abstraction, focusing instead on how this intervenes in our lives together, intersubjectivity, or what Levinas calls the intrigue of the interhuman. We make our home in language; it houses Being, yes, but, as well, language houses us. Who are we in this home, this language? The narrator of Two or Three Things is quick to complicate this home of language. Thus the second comment from the narrator: “There is increasing interaction between images and language. One might say that living in society today is almost like living in a vast comic strip.” Our being is worked upon by language, which can both welcome and alienate those who live in the home. What does it mean to live as an almost-comic strip? How peculiar. Godard’s production of a particular kind of uncanny here, where being un-at-home is constitutive of the fractured experience of language itself, sets up a proper place for the human, and then damages that place with the alienation of image. Or documents that same movement in a life given to language, then seeking a home and an authentic self in that language. The return to self, a return to language itself, is therefore stalled by a certain obscenity against the home and (as) language. Something is given that is not returned. What is most intimate and important about our being has been exploited, commodified, and thoroughly drenched in exchange. The motif and character of the housewife prostitute Juliette in Two or Three Things would seem to hold in itself something of the fate of our entire being.

And so we begin with the question of the prostitute. Why is this Godard’s figure and motif in Two or Three Things?

I

In the opening passages of Vivre sa vie, Godard quotes Michel de Montaigne’s maxim from “Of Husbanding Your Will,” where he writes that “it is necessary to lend oneself to others and give oneself to one’s self.” For the Godard of Vivre sa vie, this maxim gives broader meaning to the story of Nana, a woman whose descent into prostitution is documented in the film. Prostitution is an ambiguous metaphor in Vivre sa vie, even perhaps at the very moment at which it should be decisive. On the one hand, Nana’s descent and eventual death might be taken as a commentary on ideological illusion, how alienation is cloaked in the accoutrements of urban living and high capitalism. This particular theme is woven through nearly every Godard film, at least into the seventies. On the other hand, and from a notably more abstract space, the motif of prostitution might be a story about the relation of thought and language, how the materiality of speech alienates the thoughts that ought to animate it. This reading nicely connects Vivre sa vie to Two or Three Things, as both films interrogate subjectivity in the house of language—however Godard conceives it. “Words,” Nana notes “should express just what one wants to say” (my emphasis). And this anxiety about language is lodged within the intellect, for, as the philosopher in Vivre sa vie claims, “we must think, and for thoughts we need words.” Thought and language, companions in knowing, being, and life. Nana’s death at the close of the film is therefore a complicated enactment of finitude—either the death of the self in a world that consumes what is lent to it or the death of thinking’s highest aspiration. We are all already prostitutes of one sort or another, and death is therefore a figure of a fated failure. Or any other possible reading of Montaigne’s maxim, mixed with the motif of prostitution. It is surely polysemic in the film, as well as across the many later filmic occasions in which Godard rehearses the theme.

Whatever the ultimate purchase(s) of Godard’s guiding motif in Vivre sa vie, the political and conceptual space opened up by the question of “lending oneself” transforms Godard’s self-understanding as a filmmaker and intellectual. Vivre sa vie says more than the Godard of 1962 is able to bear. In many ways, this claim says very little. Godard was at that time still a new filmmaker. Before Vivre sa vie, Godard had directed only three feature-length films—Breathless, Le petit soldat, and A Woman is a Woman—and a half dozen shorts. At the same time, Godard’s experiment with the motif of “lending oneself to” and all of its attendant obligations makes filmmaking urgently, rather than occasionally, ethical and political. Godard’s becomes an ethical cinema at one and the same time that it becomes another kind of political cinema—and indeed the two are intertwined. The meaning of this ethical cinema will be a recurring theme throughout the present and following chapters, so the fuller sense of this kind of cinema will have to emerge in context. But it is enough to say here that the motif of lending brings a crisis of singularity into relief. To begin, there is the political (or cultural, if one prefers) phenomenon of mass culture into which the singular is absorbed and lost. Godard’s routine parodic depiction of revolutionaries responds to this crisis. As well—and this is what motivates so much of the difficult cinematic work in the seventies—the very act of filming puts the Other into an economy of lending. In both cases, something important is named in the motif of prostitution, and that something provokes in us a kind of obligation. Maybe even everything of obligation is provoked. Nana’s death, after all, is intensely sad. Obligation thereafter infuses Godard’s work with at least a thread, often a full cinematic essay, of urgency. This urgency invests the work with immense sincerity, in both form and content. Indeed, if the problem of “lending oneself to” is both material and conceptual, then the very fate of being and thinking hangs in the balance. Even the satirical moments and motifs of, say, Week-end and Pierrot le fou have a political bite because of this sincerity and the ultimate stakes of cinematic discourse. Whether a thread or an entire essay, the problem of lending comes to mean everything.

In Two or Three Things I Know about Her Godard returns to the figure of prostitution. However, the figure of prostitution is notably less ambiguous than it had been in Vivre sa vie, due to both Godard’s increasingly didactic cinematic approach and, perhaps, the emergence of a new ethical urgency. Along with his other work from the late sixties, Two or Three Things is concerned with what Godard famously calls in Masculine-Feminine “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” That is, Godard is concerned with how late capitalism interrupts the aspiration of Montaigne’s maxim. In friendship, for example, there is nobility in lending oneself to others; the friend allows us to return uncompromised, even improved. In lending oneself to certain kinds of Others, however, and especially if we are the offspring of ideology as commodity, one is halted in the return to oneself. We are halted in the greatest violence against the singular, perhaps sent into irretrievable exile, perhaps awaiting revolution. I say certain kinds of others here because Godard’s interrogation of our fate in economies of lending is so varied. One has to be attentive always to the nuances of violence against the singular. To wit: there is an important difference between lending oneself to the world of Marx and Coca-Cola and the lending of oneself constitutive of the very idea of cinematic representation. In the former case, a certain political polemic is called for, one that may be dramatized as an alienation awaiting political and social revolution for its alleviation. Thus, in Week-end we find the surreal and vicious parody of “revolutionaries,” whose political consumption ultimately turns on fellow soldiers in struggle (cannibalism), interrupted by the utterly sincere and incisive speeches by two workers, one an “Arab,” the other an “African.” The urgency of the singular—an ethical urgency through and through—is there manifest in the Other speaking back against the theoretical and praxical forms proposed to speak in that Other’s place. In the latter case, a problematic of cinematic representation, it is a question of the liminal space of filmmaking—namely, how the alienation of the Other who lends herself to the image (and so to the director, then the spectator) exposes the limits of representation in sound and image—and therefore the possibilities of radical, revolutionary filmmaking. The construction and production sites the Other of the image in the economy of lending; Godard borrows the story, face, and words, and then constructs and produces the image. And so in Ici et ailleurs we are tricked into a moment of moving sympathy for a Palestinian mother offering her unborn child to the liberation struggle, only to be caught by the camera’s retreat and the actress’ question about reshooting the lines. The point, of course, is that cinema’s natural mode of representation, which invites and even produces responses of sympathy, revulsion, and so on, plays on just this trickery. Both cases of “lending oneself to” and the consequent alienation call for some kind of revolution as the only hope, but we would be naive to conflate the two. In fact, Godard’s transformation as a filmmaker in the late sixties and seventies can be read as a self-overcoming of the naïveté of just such conflation.

Nevertheless, all of these certain others to which oneself is lent point to a central, structural problematic: ideology. By ideology I mean to evoke Louis Althusser’s notion, especially as developed in his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” essay from Lenin and Philosophy. In that essay, Althusser argues that the problem of ideology, though it serves a single and locatable purpose—namely, the reproduction of society, a certain kind of political and social economy—is itself dispersed at its origins and therefore diffuse in its appearances. Ideology is not imposed from a single or even numerable source. Ideology may serve the interest of reproducing a single kind of social class and type, but ideology is not dispensed or disseminated “from above,” so to speak. Rather, we find ideology in our every movement, in our every engagement with the world. “[I]t is clear,” Althusser argues, “that while there is one (Repressive) State Apparatus, there is a plurality of Ideological State Apparatuses.”³ The unity of ideological sites and citations—that is, the singular reproductive interest to which they are servants—“is not immediately visible,” which is to say that visibility is the task of critical reading. Political (and even ethical) reading discloses the ideological structure and function of any given site of reproduction. Part of the argument of the present chapter is that Two or Three Things is motivated by the ethical imperative at the basis of that kind of critical reading, rendering, and reappropriation. The plurality of apparatuses or sites of ideological transmission saturate the very element of our being, a saturation to which Two or Three Things bears important witness, but also against which it lobbies.

How, then, does ideological transmission operate? The plurality of ideological apparatuses gives ideology its texture and its elemental character. We find ideology everywhere, and its sites have an affective and intellectual palpability. Ideology is textured in the sense that it sustains the entire range of subjective and intersubjective life. Our epistemological, ethical, political, and even aesthetic relations are structured by dispersed, diffused, and thus constantly present ideological formations: saturation. Ideology is inside our subjectivity and between us as intersubjective actors. In the most invasive sense, Althusser argues that formations of ideology sustain what we recognize as life, thereby giving to life that element in which life is life. So it is not a question of how we choose or even habitually come across ideological formations we’ve been conditioned to find pleasing. Rather, the invasive and saturating character makes ideology invisible yet palpable, illusory yet most real. Our very movement in the world is entwined with ideology. Althusser likens this sense of ideology to Saint Paul’s conception of Logos in arguably the most famous passage from the “Ideology” essay, so it is worth quoting in full. “As St. Paul admirably put it,” Althusser writes,

it is in the “Logos,” meaning in ideology, that we “live, move, and have our being.” It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary “obviousness.”. . . [T]he “obviousness” that you and I are subjects—and that that does not cause any problems—is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction to crying out (aloud or in the “still, small voice of conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!”⁴

The familiarity of ideology is what gives the everydayness of its forms a sense of element; it is that condition into which we are always already thrown. We find ourselves, here, already saturated with ideology. We see this in Godard’s concern with the everyday in work from the late sixties, as films like Week-end and Masculine-Feminine—and even threaded through the highly didactic Le Gai Savoir—draw on this insight into ideology and always with political radicalism. In terms of that didactic and political cinema, however, the results for the revolutionary are often dispiriting. Ideology functions as elemental in late capitalism, producing a coordinated system whose capacity for absorbing resistance into its forms extends even to the point of folding revolution itself into spectacular ideological violence. Godard’s often dispiriting political cinema returns time and again to this insight.

Now, this is not to discount the often experimental innovation of these films, especially at those moments where, say, Week-end spirals into parodic critique of bourgeois revolutionary action that turns parody into paresis. The famous tracking shot of the car wreck in that film is exemplary. There is art in this didactic political work and, when one is attentive to it, the footing we might gather falls away quite quickly. Indeed, so many of Godard’s films initiate a kind of rootlessness in the spectator; one cannot ever quite get oriented or gather some footing from which to discern the story of a particular film. This quirky strategy is elaborated in image and sound through both cinematographic innovation and the disappearance of narrative structure. At every moment when one might seem to catch sight of a story, image and sound fall apart. This is what makes Godard’s work so uncommon, giving it that “art cinema” feel, as it were. That said, and this is so importantly true of Two or Three Things, the very context that sustains absurdity, parody, and critique is exceptional for its lack of exception...