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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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
