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.

On the one hand, Nana’s descent and eventual death might be taken as a commentary on ideological illusion, how alienation is cloaked by the accoutrements of urban living and high-capitalism. On the other hand, and from an importantly 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. “Words,” Nana notes “should express just what one wants to say” (my emphasis). And this anxiety about language is itself lodged within the intellect, for, as “The Philosopher” in Vivre sa vie claims, “we must think, and for thoughts we need words.” Nana’s death at the close of the film is therefore a complex death – either the death of the self in a world that consumes what is lent to it or the death of thinking’s highest aspiration. Or many other possible renderings of Montaigne’s maxim and the motif of prostitution.

Whatever the ultimate purchase(s) of Godard’s guiding metaphor in Vivre sa vie, the political and conceptual space opened up by the question of “lending oneself,” I want to content, transforms Godard’s self-understanding as a filmmaker. Vivre sa vie says more than the Godard of 1962 is able to bear. In many ways, this claim says very little. Before Vivre sa vie, Godard had directed only two feature length films – Breathless and A Woman is a Woman – and a half-dozen shorts. At the same time, Godard’s experiment with the metaphor of “lending oneself to” and all of its attendant obligations makes filmmaking urgently, rather than occasionally, ethical and political. This urgency invests Godard’s work with immense sincerity, in both form and content. Indeed, if the problem of “lending oneself to” is both material and conceptual, then the ery fate of being and thinking hangs n 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 ultimate stakes of cinematic discourse.

In 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), Godard returns to the figure of prostitution. However, the figure of prostitution is notably less ambiguous. Along with his other work from the late-sixties, 2 or 3 Things is concerned with what Godard famously calls in Masculine-Feminine (1966) “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” That is, Godard is concerned with how late-capitalism interrupts the aspiration of Montaigne’s maxim. In lending oneself to certain kinds of others, one is halted in the return to oneself – perhaps in 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. To wit: there is an important difference between the lending of 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 which 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 consumption turns ultimately to fellow soldiers in struggle (cannibalism), interrupted by the utterly sincere and incisive speeches by two workers, one from Algeria, the other from “Africa.” In the latter case, the 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. And so in Ici et ailleurs we are tricked – and thereby shown to always have already been 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 re-shooting the lines. Both cases of “lending oneself to” and the consequent alienation provoke some kind of revolution as the only (in vain?) hope, but we would be naïve to conflate the two. In fact, Godard’s transformation as a filmmakers in the late-sixties and seventies can be read as a self-overcoming of the naïveté of just such conflation.

The question that remains, then, is this: what is the character of this lending? Or, to whom is one prostituted? Here we can raise the question of ideology…