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?

All of these certain others to which oneself is lent point to a central, structural problematic: ideology. By “ideology,” I here want to evoke Althusser’s notion in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” from Lenin and Philosophy. In that essay, Althusser argues that the problem of ideology, though it may serve a singular and locatable purpose – namely, the reproduction of society, a certain kind of political and social economy – ideology itself is dispersed and therefore diffuse. Ideology is not imposed from a single or even numerable source. 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.” 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. And part of the argument of the present chapter is that 2 or 3 Things is motivated by the ethical imperative at the basis of that kind of critical reading, rendering, and reappropriation.

The plurality of ideological apparatuses gives ideology its texture and its elemental character. Ideology has texture in the sense that it sustains the entire range of subjectivity and intersubjectivity; our epistemological, ethical, political, and even aesthetic relations are structured by dispersed (and so constantly present) ideological formations. Those formations sustain what we recognize as life, thereby giving to life that element in which life is life. Althusser likens this sense of ideology to Saint Paul’s conception of logos in perhaps 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!’

The familiarity of ideology is what gives everydayness its sense of element, that condition into which was are always already thrown. We find ourselves, here, already saturated with ideology. Godard’s concern with the everyday in films like Week-End and Masculine-Feminine – and even threaded through the highly didactic Le Gai Savoir – draws on this insight into ideology and always with political radicalism, even to the point of folding revolution itself into spectacular ideological violence.

This is not to discount the often experimental character of these films, especially at those moments where, say, Week-End spirals into parodic critique of bourgeois revolutionary action. The famous tracking shot of the car wreck in that film is exemplary. Indeed, Godard’s films initiate, in the spectator, a kind of rootlessness; one cannot ever quite get oriented, gather some footing from which to discern the story of a particular film. This quirky strategy is worked through cinematographic innovation and the disappearance of narrative structure at every moment one might seem to catch sight of a story. That said, and this is so importantly true of 2 or 3 Things, the context that sustains absurdity, parody, and critique is exceptional for its lack of exceptionality. The everyday is the context in which Godard displays alienation and false-consciousness, as well as the critical intervention. It is not incidental that the Algerian and “African” speak critique for one another in Week-End while eating lunch. Godard exposes the obvious as ideological, and so the ideological as the obvious – all saturated with interruptive critique.

At the same time, and this drives the critical interruption, Godard’s treatment of ideology is animated by another concer, one more properly understood as ethical than as political. This is not to say that Godard’s cinema is not or even just occasionally political, but rather that across his treatments of ideology floats a fundamental concern with what we can call “an ethics of singularity.” How does the cinematic gaze – both of the director and of the viewer, with the former largely responsible for the latter – eclipse the singularity of the Other? Is it possible to have a cinema for-the-Other, and therefore not just a cinema of the Other in which the Other is caught by the frame, gaze, and grasp of cinematic representation?

These questions dominate Godard’s work in the seventies. That much is obvious on even a cursory viewing of films like Comment ça va?, Numero Deux, or Ici et ailleurs – the very films which comprise the focus of the following chapters. But our approach to those films must proceed from an understanding what is at stake in conceiving the singularity of the Other, as well as how Godard understands both the meaning of “the Other” with whom he is so concerned and the purchase of putting that meaning at the center of thinking about art and politics. That is, in order to understand what is at stake in Godard’s radical re-thinking and new practice(s) of cinematic representation, it is necessary to understand that which puts representation in question: the enigma of “the Other.”