I was previously writing about Godard’s return to the theme of prostitution in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, which is a rewriting of the same theme in Vivre sa vie from five years prior. The central thematic: what does it mean to lend oneself to others, but also to give oneself to oneself? We give lend ourselves to others – does it matter to whom one is lent? Read the rest of this entry »
In the opening sequences of Vivre sa vie (1962), Godard famously quotes Montaigne’s maxim “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 life to the story of Nana, a woman whose descent into prostitution the film documents. Prostitution is an ambiguous metaphor in Vivre sa vie, perhaps at the very moment at which it should be decisive. Read the rest of this entry »
A banal claim: cinema is largely structured by the interplay of sound and image. Nothing in that claim is worthy of serious contestation. But it is of course worthy of searching, complicated filmmaking. Godard’s most searching work is always, to my mind, obsessed with laying bare the complicated web of relations – in particular, those initiated by the auteur – that generates a sound or an image. The reflection on the assembly-line model (or metaphor?) of cinematic construction that at times overwhelms Ici et ailleurs, complete with alienated workers (images) and exploitative bosses (Godard, Gorin), is at once revealing self-criticism and evidence of the unlimited reach of Marxism’s enduring insights.
I’m fascinated with Godard’s theorizing – both in cinema and in reflection on cinema (if one can even draw much of a distinction in his work) – the ethics of representation. Documentary filmmaking, which for Godard is hardly distinguishable from serious fiction filmmaking, is an especially pressing context for the question. What is asked of the filmmaker, the director, that auteur who bears so much responsibility? Read the rest of this entry »
Glissant’s transmodern moment, which is something just different than the transmodern in Dussel’s sense, lies in his conception of relation identity. Relation identity uproots subjectivity – and so also collectivity – with a nomadic, rhizomatic conception of connection. Glissant takes the difficult path, here, opting for the affirmation (with all danger, detour in place) of both the pain and pleasure of separation from coloniality. In Poetics of Relation, he writes:
“Whether they are collective or individual names, the pre-Socratics, the Romans…all the proper names which come and go in Nietzsche’s texts are neither signifiers or signifieds, but designate intensities on a body which can be the body of the Earth, the body of the book, as well as Nietzsche’s own suffering body: I am every name in history…There is a kind of nomadism, a perpetual migration of the intensities designated by proper names, and these interpenetrate one another as if they are lived on a full body. The intensity can be lived only in relation to its mobile inscription on a body, and to the moving exteriority of a proper name, and this is what it means for a proper name to be always a mask, the mask of an operator.” (Deleuze)
I’ve been looking for the doubled site between Deleuze and Glissant on the question of nomadic thinking and rhizomatics. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently revisited some writing on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, considering how his use of image and sound (what I would call, not without some conceptual leaps, a single-shot montage) might enact a Levinasian conception of the relation between the Saying and the Said. My interest in Lanzmann’s film is therefore two-fold: how it conceives and enacts cinematic language and the sense of the ethical in that conceiving and enactment. Lanzmann is famously stringent on both accounts. Read the rest of this entry »
Glissant’s exposition and creative development of the concept of rhizome—and all attendant conceptions of times, memory, history, and the nomadic—gives his Poetics of Relation particular complexity. The problematic is really quite straightforward: what and who is the subject? The primary aim – even hope – of Glissant’s work is to produce or render a sense of Caribbeanness, a Caribbean subjectivity, which is something Fanon did not (could not?) accomplish. Why not Fanon? Fanon was the first to live his thinking, to paraphrase Glissant, and this “living” of his thinking delimits his theorizing of subjectivity. Now, Glissant’s remark sounds like praise of militancy, a kind of he-really-means-what-he-says admiration, but Glissant means here to underscore the fact that Fanon returned to Africa – both as a theorist and as an activist. Fanon, then, was seeking Africa, a root, a mother, a home. His work on negritude certainly gives plenty of evidence for Glissant’s remark. Read the rest of this entry »
No matter the passage of now over forty years, the question of the relation of language and transcendence raised in Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” is decisive. On first glance, this is a simple matter: to speak/write is to traffic in the logos, so any move outside being or essence (in a word, the ‘logos’) is stalled before it begins. This is not to say that transcendence is muted or erased. Rather, transcendence is interrupted in the same measure that it interrupts. The overstep on Levinas’ part is the failure to catch site of this reversal of interruption. Thus, Derrida captures his critique of Levinas in the single phrase “the dream of a pure heterology.” Read the rest of this entry »
What is history to us? I’ll start with a big claim: it is certainly a, if not the, labor against memory, and so a labor against pain and loss. Historical narrative obscures what one remembers of the pain in that narrative, how that pain is not only passed along through collective memories, but also is constitutive of the identities of those collectives. If history claimed only a marginal practice for itself, or even just that it works alongside memory without questions of legitimacy and truth, then we could tell a different story about history’s kind of story. Read the rest of this entry »
