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.”

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…

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.

But that engagement with sound and image is exclusively about movement and words. It is about an image that speaks, yet, in its speaking, is put at risk by the spatial and temporal frames of cinematic language. The auteur aims the camera and, in the editing room before and after the shot(s), marks the beginning and end of the image sound presence. To the extent that there are allocations of image and sound, speaking is always mixed with the alterity of that which speaks and that in and through which such speaking is facilitated. The image speaks from inside such complicated mixture. How can it be heard?

Godard’s difficult film Comment ça va? (1978), a collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, changes the conceptual terrain just a bit. And this “just a bit” comes to mean a lot. Comment ça va? is as much a film to be read as it a film to watch and listen; that is no doubt part of Godard’s aim, to disorient, then reorient us as spectators. The centerpiece of Comment ça va? is a still photograph of a political demonstration. Putting a still photograph in place of moving image and sound is a challenge to Godard in particular, in that the same concerns that dominate Ici et ailleurs and other films (viz., how to represent the Other) are suddenly, and decisively, brought to a halt. The image does not speak, except as a mute presence. Indeed, the muteness of the image – the “stilledness” of the still photograph – forms the obsessive theorizing of Comment ça va? from the outset. Godard’s problem, then, is not with the spatial and temporal limits of the speaking image alone (though they are certainly still there, in slightly different language), but rather now with the ethically saturated muteness of an image. The image draws the auteur’s voice to it, both in the site of Godard’s direction and the characters in the film.

The precursor to this meditation, I would argue, is Godard’s other sustained contemplation of a still-photograph: the short cinematic essay Letter to Jane (1972). In Letter to Jane, Godard (with Jean-Pierre Gorin) contemplated the meaning of a famous photography of Jane Fonda standing with a handful of Viet Cong during a visit to North Vietnam. Godard and Gorin are exceptionally critical of Fonda, as is both well-known and wholly unambiguous, and their polemic is at times as nasty as it is thoughtful. For better or worse. Fonda is characterized as a bourgeois liberal concerned as much (probably more) with the image of radical change as with genuinely material transformation, a claim nicely captured in the fact that she clutches a camera at the moment she discusses ideology – thereby enacting in one photograph the very anxiety about cameras and the oppressed constantly present in Godard’s films from the seventies. History has done little to change Godard’s and Gorin’s assessment of Fonda’s radicalism.

What interests me about this short reflection, a peculiar companion to Tout va bien, is not so much the meaning of its polemic. Or the legitimacy of their reading of the photograph, of “Jane,” and so on. Instead, I am interested in how much talking happens in relation to the photograph and how that sound works on rather than from the image. Such is the nature of the polemic, yes, but that treatment of the photography is also in profound tension with Godard’s own ethics of aesthetic representation. Recall that his 1972 interview – which contrasted his sense of responsibility to that or Marin Karmitz in Coup pour coup – insisted on moving cinema toard “in the service of” and away from the possibility of “to the detriment of,” a movement whose difficulty is the entire burden of the auteur made absolute.

Now, we can certainly understand the difference between Letter to Jane and Comment ça va? on ideological grounds. “Jane” is the bourgeois liberal who puts revolution at risk as the materiality of struggle is made into an image. The radical discourse of the journalist and his political collaborator addresses the opposite movement. Image-making is the pre-geiven against which discourse labors, laboring in Comment ça va? in order to re-render the image into material struggle. This difference is borne by the still-photographs in question: Fonda looks at the Viet Cong, whereas the worker looks into struggle itself, compatriots and enemies at one and the same demonstration. This might suggest that the two films share only the trivial similarity of concern with a still-photograph, and that the real or decisive difference lies only in political judgement. Nevertheless, we can ask a couple of questions that complicate such a distinction. What is the relation between the polemic of Letter to Jane and Godard’s general sense of responsibility to the image itself? Further, if the image always retains the rights – and even outright ability – to speak outside of what is said about it? These are Godard’s own questions in the seventies, so we can assume he asks them of himself after Letter to Jane. Or, at the very least, we can ask those questions of Godard as part of an imagined immanent critique.

Either way, a question haunts any re-viewing of Letter to Jane: what sense are we to make of so much talking? Godard and Gorin dialogue over a cluster of images, all of which return to the central image of Fonda with the Viet Cong. Dialogue over. In that very overlay, there is a violence to the image; the dialogue over the image renders the image for us, as if the photograph’s very meaning is being developed both from within and against the literally developed image, except that in Letter to Jane the “darkroom” figure is the ideological polemic directed against “Jane.”

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?

Godard is revealing in an interview from 1972, where he considers the significance of the differences between his work (in particular, his collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in Tout va bien) and Marin Karmitz’s Coup pour coup. Karmitz’s work is similarly obsessed with the ethics of representation, which he addresses in Coup pour coup by turning the camera’s voice over to the workers – the subjects of representation. That makes sense. Erasing the auteur’s hand absolves the filmmaker of responsibility for the image, and in so doing marks the film with a kind of purity.

But Godard objects:

Coup pour coup goes directly to the textile workers of Elbeuf and makes a film with them. In my personal opinion, he skips a step. He thinks that we can listen directly to what they have to say, though they’ve been denied a voice for so long, and that we can be of use to them with no problem. We think there is a problem, which is that the very medium we use was, up until now, in the hands of those we’re fighting against. Therefore, despite our good intentions, we don’t completely control it. We think we’re making a film ‘in the service of,’ and it risks being ‘to the detriment of.’ We don’t fully realize this…So I have to find a way to approach these people and, most of all, to let them speak.

“Let them speak” is therefore the deceptive commandment. Letting speak is the responsible cinematic act, but the director’s hand – from pointing the camera to editing to allocation of time to speak – is as powerful as the voice in the image. So, responsibility to both the Other’s voice and a sense of the ubiquity of the auteur sends image-making into a kind of decidability. There is no location – singular or doubled or otherwise layered – within and from which responsibility can be satsified. There is only the recurrence of the call to responsibility and the return, always, to the mixed scene of generosity and violence: cinema itself.

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:

Relation identity

- is linked not to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures;

- is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation;

- does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended;

- does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps.

Relation identity exults the thought of errantry and of totality.

The transmodern is invoked here in the (r)ejection of land as foundation or root of projection. As well, the transmodern is present in the (r)ejection of the noble lie of modernity (we are all the same) and the murderous lie of the same (Eurocentrism as inseparable from exploitation and domination).

But Glissant takes on the strangely post-transmodern, even quasi-postmodern, posture of a creolization affirming cultures as such. Not this culture. Not those cultures compatible with a postcolonial project. Rather, cultures as such, even as much in moments of contradictory contact.

The truth that Dussel identifies with the periphery is thereby placed in inseparable contact with what contradicts it. Even the center. This is on the one hand just what Mignolo calls interculturalidad, no? At the same time, it is such a complicated relation to the colonizer, a relation at once (r)ejecting and affirming the colonizer. Affirming the sense of contact – likely the contact of contradiction – but mostly (r)ejecting that colonizer. For Glissant, this is not (r)ejecting the content of modernity or Eurocentric thinking. It is instead (r)ejecting the idea that one would read such a thinking in any way other than Relation, interculturalidad, errantry. In other words, it says yes to the archipelago and no to the continent.

“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. The nomad is first, I think, insofar as the nomad names the being of the subject who, in response to this determination, can be said to take multiple roots.

The notion of intensity, which Deleuze here describes (rightly, I think) as operating in Nietzsche’s texts both locates and dislocates Nietsche as an author. Intensity locates Nietzsche as the body – or, in the case of the book, the proper name on the body – into and onto which the intensities of the tradition and counter-tradition might gather. The mobility of inscription is crucial, of course, as the condition of both the polysemic and occasional character of influence or resonance (I think intensity names both).

And so the mobility of inscription can also be said to fold the notion of intensity over into the notion of the nomadic. Polysemy and occasionality keep subjectivity – by which I mean any location of meaning – dis-located, that is, always capable of being re-located or abandoned. Intensity and the nomadic are the ways in which Deleuze reckons with what I call “incarnate historiography” – how history is written in the body.

Though Glissant forgoes the language of intensity, his conception of the nomad is located in much the same space. Especially given his emphasis on affect in the transmission of memory. Relation, Diversity, and Detour all give serious attention to how the movement of location/dis-location gives both birth to the nomad (and its rhizomatic thinking and creating) and testimony to the pain of history.

It is this latter sense of dislocation, and so the appropriateness of the nomadic, that opens some distance between Deleuze and Glissant. I think this is particularly important when we see how rhizome functions as largely descriptive and strategic for Deleuze, but largely prescriptive for Glissant. That is, for Glissant, we must rhizome a connection to place – rhizome is a verb, not just a noun or adjective. This insistence on a first connection, a creative act, is generated by a relation to painful history. The Middle Passage keeps Glissant from moving against roots (which is certainly part of Deleuze’s work as a strategy). Rather, Glissant responds to rootlessness, which is the condition given to thinking by the Middle Passage.

And therein lies no small part of the distance between Europe and the Americas…

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.

For Lanzmann, the principle of blindness is crucial; we cannot see what is filmed, he cannot see what he seeks to film, so the cinematic image has to be responsible to this blindness as both an epistemic and ethical principle or command. Thus, Lanzmann’s rather excessive attacks on Spielberg (though I think he’s essentially right about Spielberg’s Schindler’s List). There is surely more discussion to be had about Lanzmann’s successes and/or failures in relation to these principles. But then I was so surprised to find that a trailer exists for the film. See the following trailer, available to “advertise” Shoah’s inclusion in the Masters of Cinema series:

What a funky trailer.

To begin, there are no words and very little sound in the trailer (which also rarely matches or productively mis-matches the images). In the film itself, the intersection of sound and image – typically to the point of interruption – is crucial for Lanzmann’s cinematic strategy. The narration of traumatic memory, something already interrupted by the hesitations and gaps in the speaker’s telling, is doubled in its interruption by long shots of memorials, ruins, and faces. Lanzmann’s doubled interruption proceeds only by way of words; testimony is first, calling forth some sort of image within which blindness can be said to manifest. Without testimony, there is only image without context or, much worse still, images that have become familiar. Surely we’ve all seen the trains, the gate to Auschwitz. The full film of Shoah counts on the familiarity of these images, actually, insofar as Lanzmann wants to put it all in question, disturb all of our senses of fitting the film’s parts together. One can only interrupt that which sets itself up as home. At home in a series of shots, Lanzmann’s use of testimony and the camera underscore the profound epistemological and ethical violence of that home-ness. The trailer leaves the sites familiar, repeating the very violence whose contestation motivates Lanzmann’s work.

The lack of words also make all the more problematic the presence of the other central images: faces. Who are these faces? What are their stories? This is not simply to say that the faces are silent (though that is problematic enough). More significantly, I think, it casts aside the critical triad Lanzmann adopts from Raul Hilberg: victim, perpetrator, bystander. All are there, actually, but how could we know? The story of each face, which is at the same time the moral category, is set aside for the sake of a pithy teaser.

“For the sake of…” And herein lies the really problematic moment: the claiming of Shoah by capital. The trailer is a teaser so that one sees or buys the film, nothing more or less to it. A trailer can be compelling or exciting or a variety of other synomyms. It is at best only a proxy for art. The trailer invites us to consume – that’s essentially how we measure its success.

But if there is one effect of Shoah – indeed, an obstinate effect – it is the resistance of the film to any form of consumption. I recall the first time I showed Shoah to a class. The first of four segments, the first class following – I asked what folks thought of the film. First remark: could we see it in smaller portions? It is so impossible to bear, all the sadness and violence and loss. I simply suggested that the point of the film is exactly that, to be so long and difficult to bear that we approximate the precipice at the abyss between survivor and witness to the survivor (we viewers). And that it might be problematic to stand apart from this precipice. After all, the survivor cannot forget or live only in short segments. That simple suggestion brought the film into its proper focus and cleared the space, intellectual and emotional, to be exhausted and rendered silent as a kind of moral and epistemological engagement. I think that was the right way to get toward the film (one is never, by design, in the film).

So, the movement of the film toward capital exchange(s) is particularly strange and problematic. Shoah is above all a film about filming transcendence, in this case the inversion of the sublime in the abyss of loss. A trailer cannot get us to that abyss. What might be a claim only about enduring or not enduring time – say, if the trailer contained a testimony in some detail, but was simply too brief for the unbearable character of Shoah’s time – becomes in this trailer an actual betrayal of the terms of filmmaking: identification as victim/perpetrator/bystander, structures of interruption, transcendence. This is only more pressing as a question because Lanzmann has been, for better or worse, so stridently moral in his discussion of his and other Holocaust films.

In this sense, it is fitting that the trailer quotes Lanzmann’s citation of Isaiah 56:5, which declares that an everlasting name shall be given. A brilliant and complex citation on Lanzmann’s part, as it brings our attention to just how complex a proper name can be. The name brings nothing to presence, but performs an elliptical function, turning us toward the named – in this case, toward the name “Shoah,” which is the impossible name of the disaster to which the film gives testimony. The trailer undoes that name in the movement of the film to capital and logics of exchange. There is no exchange in Shoah. There is only the peculiar kind of overwhelming one has by way of an abyss of loss.

Thus, an ethics of trailers. Lanzmann’s film makes no sense without the epistemological and ethical challenge. He wouldn’t want it any other way. So, what does it mean to render a trailer of the film short, wordless, and in the exchange economy? Not sure of the proper word here. Let’s just call it “problematic.”

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.

Glissant wants to render Caribbeanness, not Africanness. To think the “tortured geography” of the Caribbean as what tears asunder with trauma, pain, and loss every turn to the past, but also gives possibility to thinking. Without nostalgia, that is, into a future. Yet, central to that future is a notion indebted to a particularly European citation of thinking: Deleuze’s notion of rhizome. What comes into view through the concept of rhizome is a sense of subjectivity attentive to trauma and loss, but also open to a future liberated from nostalgia; the rhizome needs no single root and does not need (or even thrive on) fixity and permanence. Glissant is here playing on the peculiar geography of the Caribbean, of course, but also responding to the abyss of the past we have named “Middle Passage.” The abyssal rooting in the past generates Glissant’s poetics of detour, diversity, and relation.

So, if an abyssal root gives creolized thinking to itself, which is precisely the claim Glissant makes about the relation of traumatic memory to the future, then how are we to conceive subjectivity? Implicit in the interval between traumatic memory and open future is, of course, a subject. This subject is bound by the conditions of the Middle Passage and its production of the Caribbean context within which subjectivity emerges. What is subjectivity born of an abyssal root? Who, what, and how is the Caribbean of “Caribbeanness”?

Subjectivity is generated both by and as temporal interweaving. From past into present toward future, subjectivity emerges as both the product of memory and the bearer of an open future. This ek-static moment is the condition of subjectivity as such, but the function of traumatic memory changes everything. Subjectivity emerges from Glissant’s traumatic memory, rooted in abyss and given to thinking with ghostly figures. If subjectivity cannot appeal to a single root in history, memory, or place as a holder of center, then we have to think the subject without fixity. What names this subject? How can we think subjectivity without what, for Glissant, are ultimately nostalgic undertones and resonances of alienation and dispossession? Glissant’s answer in Poetics of Relation is the rhizome and its peculiar nomadic character. “Rhizome” names the poly-rooted character of Caribbean subjectivity—the creolized subject—and “nomad” denotes the mobility of this repudiation of the single root and assertion of creolization. Without a single root, yet rooted in an abyssal past-cum-future, nomadic subjectivity moves across the rich, even opaque, terrain of creolized intellectual space. It is precisely this movement and this terrain that sustains Glissant’s conception of subjectivity.

Further, Glissant’s appeal to the rhizome opens the question of his relation to Deleuze, toward whom he only gestures. How is Glissant’s rhizome to be distinguished from Deleuze’s conception of the same—viz., what differences emerge when the rhizome emerges out of the historical experience of trauma, rather than the aporias of epistemology and metaphysics? How, for Glissant, is the rhizome to be all at once rendered a noun, adjective, and a verb? How is rhizomatic subjectivity at once thought as collective and particular? How do notions of opacity, relation, detour, and return describe the limits and possibilities of Glissant’s subject? The answer of course lies in Glissant’s development of the rhizome in a critical relationship to Deleuze’s work, a relationship that enacts, at the level of thinking subjectivity within historical experience, something akin to what Dussel calls “trans-modernity.” Dussel’s claim is that the post-modern proliferation of truths, destruction of the meta-narrative, and so on takes place in a kind of conceptual decadence – an excess or surplus within which foundations become untenable, if not absurd. The trans-modern, however, rejects modernity and post-modernity, not out of excess or surplus, but out of a condition of peripherality. From the periphery, there is no modernity to surmount, no single root to be repudiated through an emergence of narratives. Rather, to say it again, the periphery has never had such privileges; the indigenous, the afro-descended, the mixed, all begin without a fantasy or singular origins.

Glissant’s notion of Caribbeanness is exactly this periphery come back to itself. A tortured geography, sure, because of the pain of the past, the trauma of the Middle Passage that gives birth to the literal and figurative space of the Caribbean. But also a geography which has never fantasized itself as modernity, which has always already had its roots in so many cultural fragments. Trans-modernity par excellence. As trans-modern, Glissant’s rhizome decisively transforms Deleuze’s Eurocentric post-modernity from another site and another experience of history, opening Caribbean subjectivity to what Poetics of Relation calls “Diversity.” Glissant’s rhizome does not emerge out of a conceptual excess. It emerges, rather, out of a history that gives an abyss to thinking, which is then translated into a future without nostalgia, diverse in its sources, already creolized, asking only that one say yes.

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.”

Still, this is not the final word. Derrida’s criticisms stand as the measure of any language of difference, I would say, but Levinas famously gives his rejoinder in Otherwise than being, Derrida continues to write critically, and so on. Whatever the phase of the conversation, the question is the same: is it possible to bear absolute alterity in language?

This question is largely pursued in terms of philosophical and literary language. What of cinematic language? How might cinematic language function as a philosophical discourse irreducible to the play of signs typical of spoken/written language? Is it possible – to pose this in Levinasian language – for the Saying to dismantle the Said in cinematic language? What draws me to this question is a series of remarks in an interview with Deleuze (much more than his two volumes on cinema). In this interview from March 1968, concerned with the function of image and thinking in Nietzsche’s work, Deleuze proposes that cinematic language (Godard’s, in particular) can think. “Theoretically,” Deleuze writes, “Godard would be capable of filming Kant’s Critique or Spinoza’s Ethics, and it wouldn’t be abstract cinema or a cinematographic application. Godard knew how to find both a new means and a new ‘image’ – which necessarily presupposes a revolutionary content.” “Content,” for Deleuze in this interview, is what drives innovation in philosophical language.

Transcendence is just such content, even if it is as old as philosophy’s first words. What kind of transcendence? To what end? After what challenge to immanence?

Godard is one matter. Another site is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, a film whose cinematic challenge is precisely transcendence: how can the cinematic image bear the transcendence of pain and loss? “Bearing transcendence” is the crucial phrase, I think, for if cinema is to be a kind of philosophy, the cinematic image cannot be an example. Bearing and manifesting – this captures the movement Levinas describes as the birthing of the Said from the Saying, a birth from an abyss that ultimately dis-ables (if not destroys) the Said. The Medea of language, perhaps. How might we catch sight of this movement in Lanzmann’s film?

Lanzmann’s exhaustive (and exhausting) documentary on the Holocaust begins, of course, with the unrepresentable: the disaster itself. Simon Srebnik, who, upon returning to the site of his internment and giving the first testimony, repeats to Lanzmann that what happened there is “beyond understanding.” Against, say, Renais’ Night and Fog, which adopted a morally didactic and historically documentary position in relation to the disaster, Lanzmann wants to complicate our consumption of images out of an obligation to the unspeakable character of that same disaster. Shoah does not deploy silence as a response to the unspeakable. Rather, Lanzmann’s film aims at rendering our incomprehension visible and aural, which is to say, he aims at speaking about the unspeakable in a manner that represents, yet ruins that very same representation. Lanzmann conceives this ruinous representation as blindness in looking, a way of rendering the unspeakable in order to blind the spectator/consumer at the very moment we anticipate insight and comprehension. Lanzmann writes that “[n]ot to understand was my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah. I clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical and at the same time the only possible operative attitude. This blindness was for me the vital condition of creation. Blindness has to be understood here as the purest mode of looking, of the gaze, the only way to not turn away from a reality which is literally blinding.”

Now, this is already a provocative theoretical position to take, but Lanzmann is of course talking about cinematic composition. And the onus of this composition rests on a revolutionary transformation of montage.

Lanzmann accomplishes this blindness in cinematic language by complicating the time-structure of the image-sound relation. I call this a montage because Lanzmann dispenses completely with narrative form, which grants to image and sound an independence akin to that of distinct shots in standard montage sequences. Further, because he eschews documentary footage in favor of survivor testimony and ponderous shots of sites of memory, Lanzmann blends multiple times within both sound itself (memorialization) and the image itself (haunted space). Essential here is that all of these multiplicities are simultaneous, rather than in a sequence of shots. In a handful of critical passages from Shoah, Lanzmann transitions from the face of the survivor to the site described by the testimony. The survivor’s voice remains in sound, telling a story of one or another concentration camp, while the image switches from the survivor’s face to the ruined remains of the camp described in that testimony. Lanzmann repeats this strategy of displacement throughout Shoah. I say ‘displacement’ because the survivor’s narrative, insofar as it makes sense to us (the narratives are always haunted by the unknowable), can never match the landscape set out in an unfolded image. As an example, Abraham Bomba’s detailed description of the camp at Treblinka is especially noteworthy. Bomba’s voice is steady even as it tells us about the mechanisms of mass murder, while the image unfolds and moves toward, and even against, that testimony. The image cannot match the testimony. Rather, Lanzmann pans the camera across the memorial gravestones at Treblinka, which themselves are nameless and only shards of the stones remaining from the destroyed factories of death. No faces. No documentary footage. Only what remains, which is only a fragment of the unthinkable.

What do we see in this discontinuous image and sound? In a sense, we see nothing. Lanzmann’s composition refuses us the kind of presence and continuity necessary to make sense. The pure gaze is blind. But he does give us something. Very little, perhaps, but not nothing. This very little is the crossing of the already crossed sound (the ghosts of the survivor’s memory with the voice of testimony) and already crossed image (systems of violence with the fragments of what remains). This layered and discontinuous representation decomposes itself, and we register this ruin in the affect of exhaustion—we are unable to get footing or catch our breath as spectators. The transmission of this affect, and so the thinking it bears in cinematic language, is immediate and directly descendent from the unspeakability of what the film ‘documents’: catastrophe.

Perhaps, then, in this peculiar fragmentation – which is unlike most senses of the fragment, I think – is cinema thinking, manifesting, and bearing the absence we can call transcendence. Is this a pure heterology? Or a dream? Is the purity contingent upon certain catastrophic contexts, or is there a lesson to be drawn from Lanzmann about the singularity of the common and everyday?

That is for another post.

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.

Benjamin famously contests this modality of history by registering his moral objection to the “chronicler” model of the historian – the kind of historian who documents the truth of events, with the regulative ideal of completion or exhaustive documentation. This objection is figured as the angel of history, a reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. What Benjamin’s angel bears is the sadness of history, a sadness muted by the chronicler’s story of history. I say “muted,” not “mute,” because the victims of history’s violence have their own peculiar agency, no matter the intervention of historical narrative. We call this peculiar agency “memory,” which names the myriad singular and collective sites of the affective transmission of pain and trauma.

Benjamin’s treatment of the angel does not sufficiently attend to this memorial architecture of history’s sadness – understandable, as it is only a brief reflection in his “Theses on Philosophy of History.” Memory-talk is certainly there, and I’ve wondered if there is an historical link between angels and remembering. Do angels bring or transport memory? Not sure. I hope so. That would be a nice rhetorical touch and, more importantly, because the other element missing from Benjamin’s articulation of the architecture of history’s sadness is another figure of the mediator of/from the Divine: prophecy.

Prophecy changes so much. To begin, the prophet interrupts the order of things. Tiresias, that poor soul from Greek tragedy, always comes to speak against the king, asking of the king a kind of truth that is, for the king (and often, allegedly, his people), unthinkable. The impossible prophetic word, like death, becomes necessary, thereby calling for another imagining of possibility. This is why prophecy is linked to utopia in Levinas’ work: prophecy puts the order of things out-of-joint. In this way, prophecy inserts itself into the present as a normative, yet fractured and open, interval toward a future. Can we imagine the sadness of Kreon in Thebes after all that blood? No. Can we imagine a Thebes without Kreon’s hubris? Perhaps.

Levinas has so much to say about prophecy. But there are two other sites of the prophetic, both of which are articulated in the context of the Americas: Galeano and Glissant.

Galeano:

“History is a prophet who looks back: because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be.” (The Open Veins of Latin America)

Glissant:

“This exploration is therefore related neither to a schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward into the future, without the help of those plateaus in time from which the West has benefited, without the help of that collective density that is the primary value of an ancestral cultural heartland. That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past.” (Caribbean Discourse)

Both of these passages repeat Benjamin’s angel of history by facing the painful past, bearing its sadness, but also turning toward a future and announcing what the future might be or become. I find this announcement so interesting, such an important shift from how the exhaustion of the West is borne out in Benjamin’s figure, unable to say much other than its being caught in the storm from paradise, to how the Americas take a breath for the first time, gathering itself in the moment of what Glissant calls “creolization” or Mignolo calls “interculturalidad.” That first breath births another world; after colonialism and in it insidious new body called neoliberalism, there is the possibility of another future outside fantasies about the past – nostalgia. Since there is not past toward which one can gesture or dream, there is only a future. A future at this very moment, in this very place.

For that reason, Marcos is not wrong to see in the Zapatista movement or moment (it is both at once, I think) the rhizomatic politics of another world – or, as Mignolo nicely nuances it, an-other world. A world that is wholly other, but also another. A world right here, next to the old one. Prophecy is central to this imagining, then practicing, of another world, insofar as this new beginning contends with history. Prophetic relations to history, however, build not only the pain of history into the relation, but also the outrage at the pain of history. Mignolo calls this same relation the “colonial wound,” and he rightly identifies it as the thread with which rhizomatic political strategies and practices are held together. The outrage of a prophetic vision of history turns the angel of history back toward the future and makes it her own. Projected into the future by a painful past, to be sure, but turned to face the to-come with the creative reverberations opened up by creolization/interculturalidad and and outrage.

The political order is put out of joint with itself here in such an interesting way. By the pain of history in memory, yes, but also by the prophetic interruption of any hold on the social order that uncritically roots itself in the colonial wound. A wound that heals. Now there’s an interesting aporia or something like that.