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SILVERMAN KAJA
Alain Bergala titled his 1985 collection of Godard's writings and interviews Godard He defined Godard as both the disGodard.1 thereby Jean-Luc parJean-Luc cursive subject and the discursiveobject of that text.At least fromthe vantage Godard Godard point of 1985, Jean-Luc parJean-Luc mightalso have seemed the most title for Godard himself to use when since appropriate makingan authorial film, he would serve both as the enunciator and the enounced. there,too, presumably when Godard began his 1994filmic of himself as author,he However, investigation chose instead the titleJLG/JLG. He also soughtto evacuate himself fromthe position of the enunciator."The slash separatingthe two sets of initialsin the title is not a synonym for'by,"'he told Gavin Smithin a 1996interview. "There JLG/JLG is no 'by'-I don't knowwhyGaumont put it in. If there is a 'by,'it means it's a of... myself formyself...whichit absolutely is not."2 study In the extra-cinematicdiscourse that he has produced around JLG/JLG, Godard calls into question not onlyhis own authorialagency, but also the notion that thisfilmis "about" him.JLG/JLG is not an "autobiography," he maintainsin the Smithinterview, but rathera "self-portrait." And a self-portrait "has no 'me."'3 Godard anticipates the first of these claims in JLG/JLG itself."Self-portrait, not he insistslate in the film.In the closingmomentsofJLG/JLG, he autobiography," also provides a baffling version of the second of these claims. "I love," he says. "That is the promise.Now I have to sacrificemyself so thatthroughme the word 'love' means something, so thatlove existson earth."4
1. Godard ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile, 1985). The Godard, Jean-Luc parJean-Luc Godard Tome 2: sequel to thisvolume has recently Godard, appeared under the title Jean-Luc parJean-Luc 1984-1998,ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers du cinema, 1998). Gavin Smith, "Jean-LucGodard," in Jean-LucGodard:Interviews, 2. ed. David Sterritt(Jackson: of Mississippi Press,1998), p. 183. University 3. Ibid. 4. Here, as elsewhere in this essay,I have been assisted byJean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG: Phrases (Paris: P.O.L., 1996). OCTOBER 96, Spring Ltd.and Massachusetts 2001,pp. 17-34. ? 2001 October Institute Magazine, ofTechnology.
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1994. JLG/JLG.
in thiswayfromhimself? his self-portrait Why Whydoes Godard distinguish "me" be the sacrifice of his should the preconditionforlove "on earth"?And how are we to understand the relation between the two sets of initials in the title The opening shot of the filmseems to providean answerto the last of JLG/JLG? these questions,ifnot to the othertwo.It beginswitha slowdollyin on twoglass childhood photographof room in whicha blown-up doors opening onto a blue-lit Godard can be seen. At the beginningof the shot, the shadow of the photograleans forward, the leftside of the frame.Later,the photographer casting pher fills his shadow across our field of vision and obscuringthe childhood photograph. Godard then beginsspeakingin voice-over, indicatingto us thatit is hisshadowat in which is of all of those self-portraits This shot evocative we are which looking. the painterappears not onlywithinthe frameof the canvas,but also as the one not autobiogthatwhenGodard says"self-portrait, who paintsit. It thereby suggests and against over his cinematic with he is project painting, allying raphy," literature. However,Godard quicklypulls the rug out fromunder this interpretation. shot ends, he begins to conjure forthyetanother formof Even before the first "Cast the roles, begin the rehearsals,settleprobthe theatrical. self-portraiture: the entrancesand exits,learnyourlines by lems concerningthe direction, perfect "Workto in an with actor'sexaggeratedbreathing. Godard heart," says voice-over, .... Do role of skin of have the the under yourcharacter, improve youracting,get
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a rehearsal, or the finaldressrehearsal.Do the opening night.Be, as the case may be, a success, a triumph,or-on the contrary--afailure,a flop." Here Godard seems to be characterizing as a spectacle in whichhe mustperform the JLG/JLG role: the role of the filmmaker or artist.There is some question as to leading whetherhe will be adequate to thisrole, suggesting thata certaindistance separateshimas a man fromthe parthe willbe playing. However,at the end of the opening shot, as the camera focuses upon the fromthistheatrical blue-lit Godard also dissociateshimself versionof photograph, the self-portrait. In a markedly different voice,whose intonationis as orphicas the wordsit utters, he relegatesit to his youthful a radically differself.He also offers ent account of what it means to produce an auto-portrait.One delineates or oneselfas an artist, to whom or to Godard suggests, portrays by makingmanifest whatone belongs. "He possessed hope," he saysin voice-over of his youthful self, "but the boy didn't knowthatwhatcounts is to knowbywhom he was possessed, whatdarkpowerswereentitledto layclaim to him." Immediatelyafterthese words,Godard cuts to an image of Lake Geneva. This bodyofwaterforms a conspicuouspartof the landscape in whichhe has lived both his childhood and much of his adult life. It also plays a starringrole in Godard's 1990film, Nouvelle For both of these reasons,it mightseem someVague. how to "belong" to the authorofJLG/JLG. Godard himself, however, suggeststhe of the thingsthatpossess him. Godard opposite.He citesLake Geneva as the first
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returns as well as to the fieldsand woods repeatedlyto Lake Geneva in JLG/JLG, around it,and each time thislandscape assertsits priority overthe one who shows it. Godard himself drawsattentionto thisodd reversallater in the film."IfJLGis but disbyJLG,"he asks, in a sentence in which he accepts the preposition"by," its "what does this It mean? will concern childhood places meaning, 'byJLG' withno one in them,and also more recent ones, landscapes both of yesteryear, wherethings werefilmed."
Godard punctuates the opening sequence ofJLG/JLG with the names of calendar,writtenin hand on lined paper. years fromthe French Revolutionary These by-now trademarkwords signify "starting again," "beginningfromzero."5 but Surprisingly, though, what followsis not a new attemptat self-portraiture, rather a series of uninhabited images of the interiorand exteriorof Godard's withtitleswritten on lined apartmentand the landscape of Rolles, again intercut paper. Over these images, Godard says:"Usuallyit begins like this: death arrives and we put on mourning.I don't knowexactlywhy, but I did the opposite. FirstI put on mourning.But death never came, neitheron the streetsof Paris nor on Lake Geneva's shores."As he speaks,a dog barksand a funerealbell tolls.Lest we underestimate the importanceof thiscryptic monologue to the largerprojectof the film, Godard tellsus once again a momentlater thathe is in mourningfora death. He also specifiesthe person who has ostensibly died; it is not a friendor a relative, but rather himself.Finally,Godard intimates a second time that his As he puts it: "I was alreadyin mourning for mourningmayhave been premature. sole and And if he is in for myself, my unique companion." mourning something that has not transpired, Godard maintains,he has "bent the rules of some imagined LastJudgment." SinceJLG/JLG is a "December Self-Portrait," the death to whichGodard here alludes mightseem to be the one that presumablyawaits him a fewyears from now.However,the sweepingreference to the streets of Paris and to Lake Geneva's shoressuggeststhatthe period of auto-mourning extendsback manyyears,to the time of Godard's residencein France. Godard also definesthe death about which he speaks in the opening monologue in oddly textual terms.The purpose of Godard maintains,is to establishwhetheror not he will also be said to JLG/JLG, have mourneda death thathas not occurredin thefinalanalysis. The mortal event to which Godard refersin this sequence of the filmis clearlythe death of himselfas an author.This is an event that he first explicitly proclaimed in Weekend (1967), with the attribution of that film to "the scrap heap." However,even in his earliest filmsGodard mightbe said to be working
5.
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towardan authorial divestiture, withhis reliance upon naturallight,objets trouves, and documentary detail. During the Dziga Vertov Godard embarked period, upon a much more sustained and self-conscious deconstructionof himselfas author, "I" a collective"we."6 forthe enunciatory The subsequentNumero deux substituting (1975) representsan even more concerted attemptat authorial divestiture-an attemptto create a filmin whose production not onlyAnne-MarieMieville but also the actors participated,and which is at least to some degree spoken by a female voice.7Althoughthe filmsthatfolloware much less overtly political than those of the late '60s and early '70s, theycontinue the assault upon traditional forthe dialogue authorship.In them,Godard cedes more and more responsibility to quotation and becomes even more fanaticalabout naturallight. In a 1983 interview, he made explicithis continuingaversion to the classic notion of the auteur: I find it useless to keep offeringthe public the "auteur."In Venice, when I got the prize of the Golden Lion, I said thatI probablydeserve in the midonly the mane of thislion, and maybe the tail. Everything dle should go to all the otherswho workon a picture:the paws to the directorof photography, the face to the editor,the body to the actors.I don't believein the solitudeof... the auteurwitha capital A.8 Godard openlyatteststo the failure However,at the beginningofJLG/JLG, of all of his previousattemptsto bring about his own demise. He also castigates for havinglaid claim to an action thathe has not succeeded in performhimself Godard signalshis determination to tryagain to engineerhis suicide, ing. Finally, and he makes clear that the realization of his auto-portrait depends upon the of this event. accomplishment
Since authorial suicide signifies slightly differentthings at different momentsin Godard's filmmaking evidenthow we are career,it is not immediately to construeit here. However,laterinJLG/JLG, in the scene wherehe ponders the a clue. He suggestsin voice-over meaning of the words "byJLG,"Godard offers that each of us has two homelands: the one thatis given to us at birth,and the one that we create throughnegation. Although Godard providesno overtgloss upon the firstof these homelands, he associates the second with "the negative
6. Godard discusses his attempt to divest himselfof authorship during this period in "Deux Heures avecJean-LucGodard,"injean-LucGodard Godard, parJean-Luc p. 335. 7. For a further elaboration of thisreadingof Numero see Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, deux, aboutGodard (New York:NewYorkUniversity Press,1998), pp. 141-69. Speaking 8. Gideon Bachmann, "The CarrotsAre Cooked: A Conversationwith Jean-LucGodard,"in JeanLuc Godard: Interviews, p. 132.
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that Kafkaspoke of,whichwas to be created."9 As he speaks,he also cuts first to the childhood photographof himself, and then to an image of a clapboard held over a table with reels of filmon it. He therebyimplicitly connects the given homeland withhis childhood,and the one created throughnegationwiththe cinematic signifier. Godard firstintroduces the metaphor of a homeland in the intervening clothed in Lake Geneva, and Eddie Constantine sequence in whichhe walksfully uttersthe wordsfromGermanio AnnoZ4ro(1991): "Ah, myhomeland: is it true?I have imaginedyou thiswayfora long time.Happy country, magic and dazzlingoh beloved land, where are you?" In the immediatelyfollowingsequence, the camera tracks to the leftalong a row of books in Godard's study,lit with the voices in three different orange lightof a lamp. As the camera tracks, languages speak over the image about the world of ideas. In so doing, theyretrospectively characterize the beloved homeland that Eddie Constantine apostrophizes in Anno Ziroas the homeland of books. This sequence, thus once again, Germania albeit now of a linguisticratherthan a cineequates negation withthe signifier, maticsort. with negation, and what precisely Why does Godard associate the signifier does the signifier shot of the negate? If the shot of the clapboard and tracking shelfof books were the onlyreferences to negation in JLG/JLG, I would be confident in providing a psychoanalytic answerto thisquestion. In order to occupythe homeland of language, I would argue, the artist mustnegate the homeland of the real; like the subject of whom Lacan speaks, his "being" must fade away.'0 However,Godard embeds the concept of negationwithina series of references to Mallarm . When these references are factored or cinematicsigniin, the linguistic fierseems to eclipse not the referent but ratherthe artistas an individual.The death of Godard as an author thus comes to signify his demise as a biographical personage. The first of the references to Mallarm6takes the formof the intertitles on white lined paper, which Godard intersperseswith other images in JLG/JLG, as well as the manyblank pages of such paper throughwhichhe riflesnear the end of the film.Mallarm is fascinatedwiththe whitepage as the materialsupportof and-as a consequence-with the arrangementof words across it as a writing, on an obscure field," he writes in graphicdesign. "One does not writeluminously, "L'Action restrainte," "man black on white."11 For Mallarm6,the rather, pursues whitepage also signifies a potentiality ofwriting in excess of anywordsthatcan be
9. Godard refers here to Kafka'sTheMetamorphosis. A variant ofthisline also appearsin Nouvelle Vague. 10. For Lacan's most extended discussionof the eclipse of "being" induced by language, see Four Fundamental trans. Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, Alan Sheridan (New York:Norton,1978), pp. 203-29. 11. Stephane Mallarme, "L'Action restrainte," quoted from Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crisis:Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,"in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of in Literature, and History Witnessing (New York:Routledge,1992), p. 23. Psychoanalysis,
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23
::::: ::::::::::::::l::i:::i::::i::li:~:~~::l: :i:~:SO::::"~":"?~I:ier~ -::: :::i_:_ii:?~~~:iu:~~~ ::.....-_ :::::. --:::: ":-::~:-::-:::_::i::_:_::i;:_::::::::::i :~ ~: ::::~: I-:: ;i:_:::::i:-:::::_:::ii:i:il:X:::L:'~: :::::::: :-:::::::: :?:::::::: :::':::'::::::: i:: ::::::::i:i:i:i:ii^i:: ::::i i:: i::: :-:: i8i: :;:::'::' ?i' :?::::r:::-_ ~?r?'?":"::~:l :j::::::j::::::: . ::::_: :__:::_:_:_::::::;:::_:j:: ::i:4:1:j-,~~:i'~:8;::BL:-i:"":"":L: :-:i ::: :::?::i :::::l::i:::i::-::::i:::=?:r:ii:i:~--:r:
inscribed upon it: a kind of puritythat written notations could only sully.12 In the of sheets lined even more than Mallarme's pages signify JLG/JLG, emphatically whitepages a surfacefor the writing of words.In theirinvocationof childhood school days,theyalso speak to a certainimmaturity on the part of the writer-to his dependencyupon preexisting lines to avoid goingastray. But at a crucialmomentin the text,the whitepages cease to be a metaphor for the material and formal support of Godard's writing, and grow into a beforethe sequence in whichGodard metaphorforGodard himself. Immediately the of own his an intertitle with ponders meaning authorship,he shows us first the words"Whitepaper is the truemirror of man,"and then an image of the landand the shot of scape around Lake Geneva,shrouded in snow.Withthe intertitle the snowy Godard erases himself as a landscape, bodilypresence.
In a draft of a letterto Charles Morice,Mallarmewrites: 12. "The intellectual of the poem armature conceals itselfand-takes place-holds togetherin the space thatisolatesthe stanzas and amidstthe whiteof the paper; significant silence thatis no less beautifulto compose than poetry." In "Un Coup de des," he makes an even stronger claim on behalf of whatis generally assumed to provideonly the materialsupportof language: "The.blank spaces, in effect, assume importance, strikefirst..." Both of these passages are isolated and translatedby Marion ZwerlingSugano in her excellentdiscussionof
Mallarme and the blank page, upon which I draw here. See The Poeticsof theOccasion: Mallarmi and the
Poetry (Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press, 1992), pp. 83-95. Other relevanttextsby of Circumstance Mallarmeare "La Declaration foraine"and "Prose."
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emergesas the agencyforGodard's deUltimately, language also manifestly we glimpsehim writing in black ink on a piece of Late in the film, individuation. The is lit letterhead the flame of a series of image only by stationery. Son/Image matches,which Godard holds in his other hand. A montage of Lake Geneva and its environs follows, interspersed by titles writtenon lined paper. Over this sequence, Godard saysin voice-over: When we express ourselves,we say more than we want to. We express but we speak the universal.I am cold. It is I who says:"I the individual, it am cold." But is not I who am heard. I disappear between these two momentsof speech. All thatremainsof me is the man who is cold, and into an unknown, thisman is everyone.... In speaking,I throwmyself forit.I have to become universal. land,and I become responsible foreign Here, too, Godard is in dialogue withMallarme.In a May 14, 1967, letterto Henri Cazalis, Mallarme announced the death of himselfas "the Sttephane you knew" and his rebirth as an impersonal "capacity possessed by the spiritual Universe to see itself and develop itself, through what was once me."13 Mallarme characterizes his relationship to the spiritual universe Interestingly, to throughthe same verb that Godard uses in the opening sequence ofJLG/JLG characterize his relationship to the landscape of Rolles: the verb "to possess." he too represents himself notas thepossessor, butrather as thepossessed. Moreover,
incommensurate withthe idea of Biographicalerasure mightseem radically an artisticself-portrait, but it is Godard's veryphenomenological idea that the artistis not properlya creator,but ratherthe site where words and visual forms inscribeor installthemselves.(I have recourse to the metaphor of inscriptionas well as thatof installationbecause Godard himself sometimesthinksof the artist as a receptacle,and sometimesas a writing surface.)Neitherof these actions can occur where the authorial ego reignssupreme,since thisego then occupies the place where the worldshould be. It is consequentlyonlyinsofaras the artistsucceeds in negatinghimself as a biographicalpersonage thathe can truly be said to be an artist.Godard providesan explicitarticulation of thisidea in an interview in Le Monde. he claims,is JLG/JLG, an auto-portrait, in the sense thatthe paintershave practicedthisexerbut as an interrogation on paintingitself.., art cise; not by narcissism, is greaterthan men, greatereven than artists.... Me, I always regarded
13. trans.Rosemary of Chicago Press, Letters, Stephane Mallarme,Selected Lloyd (Chicago: University 1988), p. 74. Philippe Sollers also notes thatGodard is in dialogue withthisletterfromMallarm6in in "JLG/JLG, un cinema de l'Ftre-lA," in Cahiers du Cinima489 (1996), p. 39. JLG/JLG
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cinema as greater than I. JLG/JLG is an attempt to see what cinema can do with me, not what I can do with it.14 As Godard helps us to understand through a montage sequence early in JLG/JLG,a self-portrait should consequently show not the artist himself, but rather what he perceives. This montage begins with a shot of an illuminated lamp in Godard's apartment. A moment later the camera dollies firstto the lamp's watery reflectionin an adjacent glass window,and then-after several interveningintertitles and shots from the interior of his apartment-to a video camera standing on Godard's dining-room table. The same scene is reflected in the viewfinder,which can be glimpsed through the window behind: the window and walls of the building across the street. This shot replicates the formal structure and colors of the with which JLG/JLG self-portrait begins; it, too, shows a reflexiveimage-within-theimage, and it too is suffused with blue. Here, however, Godard as biographical author is present only through his absence, both from the larger frame of the image, and from the frame within the frame. We see neither the JLG who represents, nor the one who is represented, only what he sees.
10 May, in Le Monde, 14. This is quoted fromGodard byJean-Michel Frodon in his essay'"JLG/NYC," 1994.
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In "The Death of the Author,"Roland Barthes suggeststhat afterhis bioLike Flaubert'sBouvard and graphicaldeath Mallarmewas rebornas a "scriptor." Pecuchet, he could only"imitatea gesturethat [was] alwaysanterior... mix writAs should be clear by now,with ings, [and] counter the ones withthe others."15 thisnotion of the scriptor we reach the explanatory limitofJLG/JLG's various references to Mallarme. The Godard who liveson afterhis authorial death is not a What he receives is language itself,which now scriptor,but rather a receiver. as the veritable of speech and writing. both inJLG/JLG lanemerges agent Finally, a It includes not the and guage enjoys radically expanded meaning. only linguistic cinematicsignifier, but also sensory perceptionof all sorts. begins witha ringingtelephone,and thissound is a repeated one JLG/JLG elsewhere in the film.The firsttime we see the adult Godard in the film,it is afterthe prolongedringingof one telephone,and the sound of him speakshortly to the caller.As the camera cuts to an extremelong shot of him sitting at a ing desk, the telephone again begins to ring. Godard's apartmentis also the site for the receptionof an enormousamount of otherstimuli.Televisionand videotapes on largevideo monitors, and at one pointwe are made privy to the playconstantly of the vast video Godard also shows himorganizingprinciples library. repeatedly self reading aloud from books he has pulled off the shelf, and gazing at the images of Lake Geneva and reproductionsof famouspaintings.Surprisingly, the surrounding which would seem to be the mostpersonal images in landscape, the film, also came to Godard fromsomeone else-from a photographerhe paid to shoot footageof his own childhood landscape.16 In a 1983 interview, Godard demonstratesa remarkableself-consciousness about his aesthetic project. "I am a person who likes to receive,"he says there; "the camera, forme, cannot be a rifle, since it is not an instrument thatsends out but an instrument thatreceives.And it receiveswiththe aid of light."17 Godard is At the end of one of itself. equallyexplicitabout his statusas a receiver inJLG/JLG the sequences in which he reads aloud fromother people's texts,he drawson a with large piece of blank paper his own versionof the twosuperimposedtriangles which Lacan schematizes the field of vision in Four FundamentalConcepts of Withthisdouble triangle, Lacan helps us to visualizethe secondariPsychoanalysis. ness of the viewer to what he sees-to understand that "perception is not in Lacan puts it elsewherein the same work,thingspaint themselves on the spectator'seyes.19
[him]," but rather in "the objects that [he] apprehend [s]."18 By means of light, as
15. Roland Barthes,"The Death of the Author,"in Image-Music-Text, trans.Stephen Heath (New York:Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146. 16. Smith,"Jean-Luc Godard,"p. 185. 17. Bachmann,"The CarrotsAre Cooked," p. 137. 18. Fundamental Lacan, Four Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, p. 80. 19. Ibid., p. 96.
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to clarify the transmission AlthoughGodard uses the superimposedtriangles of sound ratherthan light,he too emphasizesthe projectivenatureof the perceptual stimulus, and the receptive position of himself-as-perceiver. Godard introduces this sequence with a rhymethat includes his own childhood name: "And nowJeannot, withstereo."He then goes on to sugJeannot-which rhymes that the of gest phonetic similarity 'jeannot" and "stereo"is indicativeof a more relation. "I, who listenand watch,"he says,in obvious referenceto his profound stereo,"am here,because I receivethisprojectionas I face it." The notion of the artist as a receiverrepresents a much more radical reconof than at first ceptualization authorship might appear. Since Brecht, the which alternate forms of authorshiphave been predominantmetaphor through is the and Brecht-and, by extension,political filmmakers imagined producer.20 criticsof the '60s and '70s, forwhom Brechtwas a crucialreferencepoint-priviramifications. The notion of the artist as a leged thismetaphorforits materialist is the which also Godard himself uses in Numeo deux,aligns art producer, trope withworkratherthan inspiration or creation;relegatesthe artist to the statusof a laborer; and allows for a more collectiveand at times even de-anthropomorphic notion of the conditionsunder whichan artwork comes to be. The author as producer is nevertheless stilla molder,a shaper,a maker.The artistas receiverdoes not act in anyof theseways.Indeed, he seems not to domuch of anything. The production metaphor derives much of its polemical force from its which has dominated twentiethopposition to the metaphor of "consumption," discussionsof aestheticreception.In Brecht'sown writings, century bourgeoisart is a "culinary" or confectionary art: it invitesits spectatorsto "eat" it.21 His own on the otherhand, not onlymakesproducersof the actors,the direcepic theater, tor,and the set designer,but also ideallydoes the same withits spectators."Our must take second place to what is represented," Brechtwritesin representations "A Short Organum for the Theatre," "and the pleasure feltin their perfection mustbe converted into the higherpleasurefeltwhen the rulesemerging fromthis life in societyare treated as imperfectand provisional.In this way the theatre leaves itsspectatorsproductively the spectacle is over."22 disposed even after The notionof receptionhas been renderedproblematic within politicaltheory and practicebecause of itsapparentassociationwithresignation as well as inactivity. To be in a receptive relation to external stimuli is assumed to implya passive of Brecht,but acceptance in the face of the "given."Not onlywithinthe writings
20. Brechtspeaks in "A Short Organum forthe Theatre" of his "passion forproducing" (Brecht on ed. John Willett[New York: Hill and Wang, 1957], p. 185), and in general uses metaphorsof Theatre, Walter Benjamin also titles his essay on Brecht "The Author as Producer" production frequently. trans.Edmund Jephcott[New York: Schocken (Reflections: Essays, Autobiographical Writings, Aphorisms, Books, 1978],pp. 220-38). 21. See Brecht,"The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre,"in Brecht on Theatre, p. 35. 22. Brecht,"A ShortOrganum forthe Theatre,"pp. 204-5.
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also withinall of those discourses that can be ranged under the rubric of postthe predominant impulse has been a directlycontraryone: to structuralism, at everyturn.Those of us who have labored withinthe field challenge "givenness" the culturalderivaof post-structuralist theoryhave been at pains to demonstrate natural.And whatis of culturalderivation, we tion of even whatis mostseemingly transformed. have been hastyto add, can be completely reconceivesthe category of the "given." In JLG/JLG Godard radically He sugin this be not the that itself to us sometimes what product gests waymay presents As has alreadybeen pointed out of our own naturalizing but rathera gift. activity, thisunderstanding by Heidegger,whom Godard invokesseveraltimesinJLG/JLG, is inherentin the Germanlanguage.23 In German,one does not say of "givenness" means "it gives." This is "thereis,"or "thereare,"but rather"esgibt," whichliterally not a theological account of Being. When a German speaker says "es gibtdie she does not imputethe as "thereare flowers," whichwe would translate Blumen," " Es gibt to an externalagent. The "es" in "esgibt"is empty. existenceof the flowers in the dieBlumen" means thatthe flowers arein the formof a giving, even perhaps formof a self-giving. In addition to invokingBeingand Time, and thereby Heidegger's account of in Godard also an Being JLG/JLG, puts into the mouthof his blind negative-cutter edited amalgamation of a number of passages fromMerleau-Ponty'sThe Visible and the Invisible. This clusterof passages,whichshe deliversin the formof a monologue late in the film,is devoted to the concept throughwhich Merleau-Ponty conceptualizeshis own versionof Being: whathe calls the "flesh"of the world."If the passage quoted by mylefthand can touch myrighthand, as it touchesthings," the negative-cutter reads, touch it touching,why,touching the hand of another,will I not be touching the same power of joining the things that I touched with mine? Now, the domain, we quicklyrealize,is limitless, ifwe can show that fleshis an ultimateidea, thatit is neitherunion nor composition of two substances,but can be conceived in itself.If the visible has a relation to itself that traversesme, that constitutesme as I watch, watchingthis circle,which I do not create,but which creates me, this winding of the visible withinthe visible can traverse,animate other bodies, as well as mine.And ifI could understandhow thiswaveis born in me, how the visible over there is also my landscape, I can understand that elsewhere too it closes on itself,and that there are other landscapes than myown.24
23. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, "The Nature of Language," in On theWayto Language, trans.PeterD. Hertz (San Francisco:Harper & Row,1 971), pp. 87-88. For the passages thatcomprise the basis forthismonologue, see Merleau-Ponty, 24. The Visible and the trans.Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:Northwestern Invisible, Press,1968), pp. 140-41. University
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With this monologue, Godard suggestsonce again that the seen precedes fromelsewhere.Extraordinarily, he also the seer-that our perceptionsare a gift of maintainsthatthe seer himself out what he sees: that the visible world emerges to him,but giveshim to himself. not onlygivesitself
Godard also reconceptualizesthe "given"inJLG/JLG througha series of refNouvelle erences to his own 1990film, Vague.25 Alreadyin the opening sequence he and the subsequentvisual,verplaysa fewbars fromthe musicalscore of thatfilm, bal, and musical citations are vast. Godard cites this film so often because it half of Nouvelle providesan extended meditationupon giving.In the first Vague, Elena showersLennox withgifts, and in the second half he does the same with her. Most of the time these giftswork to debilitate and indebt the recipient. However,on two occasions a pure giftis given-a giftthatbankruptsneitherthe of power.The first givernor the receiverand stands outside the psychodynamics time this giftis given is when Elena saves Lennox fromhis automobile accident. The second of these occasions occurs at the veryend of the film, when Lennox savesElena fromdrowning. The most importantreferenceto Nouvelle occurs during Vaguein JLG/JLG the twilight scene when Godard reads aloud fromtwoJean-PaulToulet books. As he moves fromhis bookshelvesto his desk, at which he will sitwhen reading,we hear the centralcharacterfrom Andre Bresson's TheDiaryofa Country Priest (1951) his last conversation withthe dead Countess,presumably froman offdescribing screenvideo monitor. "I said to her,'Go in peace,"' he recounts,"and she received this peace on her knees. O miracle thatone can give what one does not oneself possess." Godard providesa variantof these lines in the scene in Nouvelle Vague whereElena rescuesLennox fromhis traffic accident.As Lennox, who is lyingon the ground, reaches his hand up to that of the woman standingabove him, she says:"How wonderfulto give whatyou don't have,"and he responds:"Miracleof empty hands."26As these two characters speak, Godard shows the two hands reachingtowardeach other in close-upagainstthe blue, brown,and green of the landscape behind. The image of one hand reachingout to another recursin the second drowning scene and is the centralmetaphorin Nouvelle Vague. Godard also reconceiveswhat it means to receive in JLG/JLG, and here, too, Nouvelle Godard re-semanticizes the act of receiving in part Vague figures centrally. where "to Priest, through the already-citedpassage from TheDiary of a Country receive"means to die in peace. He also reverts to the musical theme frequently
For an extended discussionof givingand receiving 25. in Nouvelle see Silverman and Farocki, Vague, About Godard, Speaking pp. 197-227. 26. Here and elsewhere I have consulted the text of NouvelleVaguepublished in L'Avant-Scne 396/397 (1990). Cinima,
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thathe playsin the scene in Nouvelle in whichElena dances withLennox in Vague the livingroom of her house. In this scene, Elena describes everything that she Lennox. "I'll workforyou the livelongday,"she promiseshim, "At plans to offer it is not Lennox who then maniHowever, nightyou'll reproachme formyfaults." festsgratitude to her, but rather she who manifestsit to him. "Thank you for receiving,"she quietly says.A moment later Godard shows Elena on her knees beforeLennox, reachingup to him in gratitude.Here, "to receive"paradoxically the greatestgiftany of us can confer emerges as a giftin its own right--perhaps in the very sense of thatword. upon another.It also emergesas an action, strongest "To receive" is thereby divested ofitsfalseassociation withinactivity and resignation.
But we have not yet accounted for all of the transformationsto which Godard attemptsto subject himselfin JLG/JLG. He seeks not merelyto accept what has been givento him,but also to promote"love on earth."What are we to make of this puzzling ambition? An extraordinary passage fromGodard's 1983 interviewwith Gideon Bachmann seems at firstglance to clarify how an artist love. "The cinema is the love, the meeting,the love of mightpromulgateearthly ourselvesand life,the love of ourselveson earth,it'sa veryevangelicalmatter, and it'snot bychance thatthe whitescreenis a canvas,"he saysthere."In mynextfilm, I want to use it in thisway,the screen as the linen of Veronique, the shroud that Godard here characterizes keeps the trace,the love, of the lived,of the world."27 cinema in termsverysimilarto those throughwhichAndre Bazin describes the photographin "The Ontologyof the PhotographicImage." Because of the receptivepropertiesof filmemulsionand the silverscreen,cinema bears the imprint of what it records. It is consequentlyable to pierce the "spiritualdust and grime" withwhichour eyesnormally coverwhattheylook at and to presentit in all of its and loveable "virginal" "purity."28 However,it is importantto rememberthat Godard is speaking here about Hail, Mary (1985), not JLG/JLG. Although in the later filmGodard continues to elaborate upon the ethicsof reception,whichhe mightbe said to introducewith the first, he goes one step further. Ratherthan usingfilmemulsionand the filmic screen as the linen of Veronique in JLG/JLG, he attemptsto become himself not the blank where the world writes itselfand the receptacle housing merely page surface that allows others to see what has sensorydata, but also the reflecting been written. a series of additional references to Nouvelle Through Vague, JLG/JLG also redefines worldlove itself in a waythatincludesthe human subject.
27. Bachmann,"The CarrotsAre Cooked," p. 132. 28. Andre Bazin, "The Ontologyof the PhotographicImage,"in What trans.Hugh Gray Is Cinema?, of CaliforniaPress,1967), p. 15. (Berkeley:University
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nor "receiving," is neither"giving" tracedbyNouvelle The largerfigure Vague Lennox mightbe said to giveback to Elena in the second but rather"reciprocity." scene the giftthatshe giveshim in the much earlieraccidentscene. In drowning of the world: to respond in a similarfashionto the gift Godard attempts JLG/JLG, what is projected to "reflect" back,as he puts it in theJeannot/stereo monologue, is to the the returned onto him.However, whereasin Nouvelle Vague gift punctually of otherseers. itbounces offin the directionof an infinity sender,inJLG/JLG ofgiving mostfully The scene in whichGodardelaborates upon thereciprocity from is the one in whichthe negative-cutter and receiving Merleau-Ponty's quotes The Visible and theInvisible. Through her monologue, Godard bringstogetherthe mostopposed to one another-seeing and touching. twosenses thatare generally "to touch,"and "to touch,""to see." Godard also insists "To see" comes to signify of every act of seeingor touching."In touchinganotherperupon the reversibility son I touch someone who possessesthe same powerto touch me,just as in seeing another I see someone capable of seeing me," he in effectsays. In addition, Godard communicatesthrough the various passages he quotes fromMerleauand otherprospects;what Pontythe idea thatthereare otherseers than himself, Godard suggests is true of himself is therefore true of all other subjects.Finally, thatwhat is apprehended by one seer need not be closed offto others; cinema
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and other art forms can send offwhatone seer has seen in the directionof other seers. He metaphorizes the looping of the visible fromone viewer to another througha close-up of a roll of negative filmmovingaround the bobbins of his editingtable,now overtly connectingitwithcinema.
Does Godard succeed in becominga pure receiver, receptacle,and reflector of stimuli, whichhave theiroriginelsewhere? He himself suggestsnot. Late in the in whichhe writes in the illuminationprovidedbya matchsequence inJLG/JLG, stick, he looks at a Rembrandt image on a video monitor. He then says: "To withprecaution,bymeans of myown flesh,the universality realize,withhumility, intowhichI carelessly threw thatis mysole possibility, myself, mysole command.I said that I love. That is the promise." Afteruttering these words, he cuts to another snowyimage of the landscape around Rolles, in a referenceback to the "whitepaper is the truemirror of man" intertitle. the competingintertiHowever, tles "the temptationto exist" and "I am a legend" show up shortlybefore this sequence, and even as Godard looks at the Rembrandtpaintingit giveswayto the a match. image of himself lighting Godard as biographicalauthor also makes a series of additional comebacks, and must be repeatedly banished. A few shots after his image replaces the Rembrandtpainting on the video monitor,Godard appears once again on the same monitor. Since on thisoccasion the "real" Godard extinguishes his matchat the same time as his video counterpart, he is much more manifestly presentboth as authorial representer and authorial representation. Like the shot withwhich a conventionalself-portrait. begins,thisshot consequently JLG/JLG approximates Godard then annihilateshimself once more. In voice-over, he stages a conversationbetween two men. The first man advisesthe second to ask himself what a government is. The second responds:"A group of people who govern." "No,"says the other,"a government is youracceptingto let yourself be governed." "But that's ridiculous," saysthe second, "thatwould mean thereis nothingup there.Nothing at all." "Exactly," With the last part of thisexchange, the video respondsthe first. monitorgoes blank. Godard then uttersthe words "self-portrait" in voice-over, an allegoryfor a verydifferent kind of makingevident that thejoke constitutes author than the one he has just revealed himself to be-for whatmightbe called "the author-as-no-one."29 A momentlater,though,we see Godard playingtennis,a game whichoccua pies central place in the filmmaker's legend, and which consequentlysignifies thematizesthe tennissequence througha "biographicalauthor."Godard further
Godard is also in eitherwitting 29. or unwitting here,who saysat a key dialogue withMerleau-Ponty momentin TheVisible and the "in a sense, as Valerysaid, language is the voice of no one, since Invisible, itis the very voice of the things, the waves,and the forests" (p. 155).
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to Nouvelle in whose closing momentsa tennis series of references joke is Vague, with the also made. One of these referencestakes the formof two intertitles simultanewords"the past is neverdead, it hasn'teven passed yet," whichfunction structure of Nouvelle and to suggest to evoke the narrative Vague's ously repetitive thatGodard has not yetdivestedhimself of his authorial mantle.The scene with in whichGodard expressesproprietary the Latin-speaking woman follows, rights famethat overher coat, and in whichfirst she and then he laysclaim to an artistic after thisscene, an intertitle makeseven willlastthroughout eternity. Immediately more explicitthe premature natureof Godard's claim to be dead as a biographical author:"He hasn'teven passed yet"[myemphasis]. Over the turning pages of his lined notebook,Godard repeatsthe words "I said thatI love. That is the promise." withthewords"I love"Godard lays Although still claim to an achievedcondition,theword"promise" seems to signalsomething to come. Then, as the camera cuts to a shot of green fieldsand trees,Godard openly acknowledgesthat he is not yet ready for the Last Judgment.The love whichhe seeksboth to practiceand to promotedoes not yetexist,and his authorial death still awaits him. Godard nevertheless assures us that what has not yet so been accomplishedlies in the immediate future. "Now I have to sacrifice myself so thatlove existson earth," that throughme the word 'love' means something, I will "In recompense,at the end of thislong undertaking, he saysin voice-over:
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end up being he who loves. That is, I willmeritthe name I gave myself." But even cannot authenticatein the present thisassertionseems unsustainable.The future a claim thatone has alreadymade in the past. But perhaps it is wrongto see Godard's failureto achieve his goal for once and forall as the discreditation or his project.As we learn from eitherof himself all Nouvelle and succumbs to the logic of powerand Vague, receiving givingquickly of the the world is we mustlearn over and exchange; gift consequently something overagain to accept and to return.0o Like all egoic structures, biographicalauthoris also not from which can ship something anyone definitively emerge; as Lacan tells us in his first but we cannot seminar,we can enter the imaginaryregister, The death of the authoris thusbetterunderstoodas an ongoingprocess leave it.31 than as a realizable event. Once we make this semantic adjustment,the crucial question to ask of Godard is no longer whetherhe succeeds in layinghis ghost to restin JLG/JLG. It is, instead,whetherhe is able to sustainhimself definitively there and elsewhere in themode In spite of his repeated remissionsand ofdying. even temporary the is recoveries, prognosis clear: here is a patientwho willalways have at least one footin the grave.
30. For an extended elaboration of the theoreticalassumptionsupon whichthisessayis based, see (Stanford:Stanford myWorld Press,2000). Spectators University 31. For Lacan's most extended discussionof the imaginary see his The Seminar register, of Jacques Press,1988). University
Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge
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