The Author as ReceiverAuthor(s): Kaja SilvermanSource: October, Vol. 96 (Spring, 2001), pp. 17-34Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779115 .Accessed: 14/01/2011 12:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org

The Author as Receiver

KAJA SILVERMAN

Alain Bergala titled his 1985 collection of Godard's writings and interviews Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard.1 He thereby defined Godard as both the dis- cursive subject and the discursive object of that text. At least from the vantage point of 1985, Jean-Luc Godard parJean-Luc Godard might also have seemed the most appropriate title for Godard himself to use when making an authorial film, since there, too, he would presumably serve both as the enunciator and the enounced. However, when Godard began his 1994 filmic investigation of himself as author, he chose instead the title JLG/JLG. He also sought to evacuate himself from the posi- tion of the enunciator. "The slash separating the two sets of initials in the title JLG/JLG is not a synonym for 'by,"' he told Gavin Smith in a 1996 interview. "There is no 'by'-I don't know why Gaumont put it in. If there is a 'by,' it means it's a study of... myself for myself... which it absolutely is not."2

In the extra-cinematic discourse that he has produced around JLG/JLG, Godard calls into question not only his own authorial agency, but also the notion that this film is "about" him. JLG/JLG is not an "autobiography," he maintains in the Smith interview, but rather a "self-portrait." And a self-portrait "has no 'me."'3 Godard anticipates the first of these claims in JLG/JLG itself. "Self-portrait, not autobiography," he insists late in the film. In the closing moments ofJLG/JLG, he also provides a baffling version of the second of these claims. "I love," he says. "That is the promise. Now I have to sacrifice myself so that through me the word 'love' means something, so that love exists on earth."4

1. Jean-Luc Godard parJean-Luc Godard, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile, 1985). The sequel to this volume has recently appeared under the title Jean-Luc Godard parJean-Luc Godard, Tome 2: 1984-1998, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers du cinema, 1998). 2. Gavin Smith, "Jean-Luc Godard," in Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, ed. David Sterritt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998), p. 183. 3. Ibid. 4. Here, as elsewhere in this essay, I have been assisted by Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG: Phrases (Paris: P.O.L., 1996).

OCTOBER 96, Spring 2001, pp. 17-34. ? 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

OCTOBER

All illustrations: Jean-Luc Godard. Film stills from JLG/JLG. 1994.

Why does Godard distinguish his self-portrait in this way from himself? Why should the sacrifice of his "me" be the precondition for love "on earth"? And how are we to understand the relation between the two sets of initials in the title

JLG/JLG? The opening shot of the film seems to provide an answer to the last of these questions, if not to the other two. It begins with a slow dolly in on two glass doors opening onto a blue-lit room in which a blown-up childhood photograph of Godard can be seen. At the beginning of the shot, the shadow of the photogra- pher fills the left side of the frame. Later, the photographer leans forward, casting his shadow across our field of vision and obscuring the childhood photograph. Godard then begins speaking in voice-over, indicating to us that it is his shadow at which we are looking. This shot is evocative of all of those self-portraits in which the painter appears not only within the frame of the canvas, but also as the one who paints it. It thereby suggests that when Godard says "self-portrait, not autobiog- raphy," he is allying his cinematic project with painting, over and against literature.

However, Godard quickly pulls the rug out from under this interpretation. Even before the first shot ends, he begins to conjure forth yet another form of

self-portraiture: the theatrical. "Cast the roles, begin the rehearsals, settle prob- lems concerning the direction, perfect the entrances and exits, learn your lines by heart," Godard says in voice-over, with an actor's exaggerated breathing. "Work to

improve your acting, get under the skin of your character, have the role of.... Do

18

The Author as Receiver

a rehearsal, or the final dress rehearsal. Do the opening night. Be, as the case may be, a success, a triumph, or-on the contrary-a failure, a flop." Here Godard seems to be characterizing JLG/JLG as a spectacle in which he must perform the leading role: the role of the filmmaker or artist. There is some question as to whether he will be adequate to this role, suggesting that a certain distance sepa- rates him as a man from the part he will be playing.

However, at the end of the opening shot, as the camera focuses upon the blue-lit photograph, Godard also dissociates himself from this theatrical version of the self-portrait. In a markedly different voice, whose intonation is as orphic as the words it utters, he relegates it to his youthful self. He also offers a radically differ- ent account of what it means to produce an auto-portrait. One delineates or

portrays oneself as an artist, Godard suggests, by making manifest to whom or to what one belongs. "He possessed hope," he says in voice-over of his youthful self, "but the boy didn't know that what counts is to know by whom he was possessed, what dark powers were entitled to lay claim to him."

Immediately after these words, Godard cuts to an image of Lake Geneva. This body of water forms a conspicuous part of the landscape in which he has lived both his childhood and much of his adult life. It also plays a starring role in Godard's 1990 film, Nouvelle Vague. For both of these reasons, it might seem some- how to "belong" to the author ofJLG/JLG. Godard himself, however, suggests the

opposite. He cites Lake Geneva as the first of the things that possess him. Godard

19

OCTOBER

returns repeatedly to Lake Geneva in JLG/JLG, as well as to the fields and woods around it, and each time this landscape asserts its priority over the one who shows it. Godard himself draws attention to this odd reversal later in the film. "IfJLG is by JLG," he asks, in a sentence in which he accepts the preposition "by," but dis- places its meaning, "what does this 'byJLG' mean? It will concern childhood landscapes both of yesteryear, with no one in them, and also more recent ones, where things were filmed."

*

Godard punctuates the opening sequence of JLG/JLG with the names of years from the French Revolutionary calendar, written in hand on lined paper. These by-now trademark words signify "starting again," "beginning from zero."5 Surprisingly, though, what follows is not a new attempt at self-portraiture, but rather a series of uninhabited images of the interior and exterior of Godard's apartment and the landscape of Rolles, again intercut with titles written on lined paper. Over these images, Godard says: "Usually it begins like this: death arrives and we put on mourning. I don't know exactly why, but I did the opposite. First I put on mourning. But death never came, neither on the streets of Paris nor on Lake Geneva's shores." As he speaks, a dog barks and a funereal bell tolls. Lest we underestimate the importance of this cryptic monologue to the larger project of the film, Godard tells us once again a moment later that he is in mourning for a death. He also specifies the person who has ostensibly died; it is not a friend or a relative, but rather himself. Finally, Godard intimates a second time that his mourning may have been premature. As he puts it: "I was already in mourning for myself, my sole and unique companion." And if he is in mourning for something that has not transpired, Godard maintains, he has "bent the rules of some imag- ined LastJudgment."

Since JLG/JLG is a "December Self-Portrait," the death to which Godard here alludes might seem to be the one that presumably awaits him a few years from now. However, the sweeping reference to the streets of Paris and to Lake Geneva's shores suggests that the period of auto-mourning extends back many years, to the time of Godard's residence in France. Godard also defines the death about which he speaks in the opening monologue in oddly textual terms. The purpose of JLG/JLG, Godard maintains, is to establish whether or not he will also be said to have mourned a death that has not occurred in the final analysis.

The mortal event to which Godard refers in this sequence of the film is clearly the death of himself as an author. This is an event that he first explicitly proclaimed in Weekend (1967), with the attribution of that film to "the scrap heap." However, even in his earliest films Godard might be said to be working

5. Godard first refers in this way to the French Revolutionary calendar in Weekend (1967).

20

The Author as Receiver

toward an authorial divestiture, with his reliance upon natural light, objets trouves, and documentary detail. During the Dziga Vertov period, Godard embarked upon a much more sustained and self-conscious deconstruction of himself as author, substituting for the enunciatory "I" a collective "we."6 The subsequent Numero deux (1975) represents an even more concerted attempt at authorial divestiture-an attempt to create a film in whose production not only Anne-Marie Mieville but also the actors participated, and which is at least to some degree spoken by a female voice.7 Although the films that follow are much less overtly political than those of the late '60s and early '70s, they continue the assault upon traditional authorship. In them, Godard cedes more and more responsibility for the dialogue to quotation and becomes even more fanatical about natural light.

In a 1983 interview, he made explicit his continuing aversion to the classic notion of the auteur:

I find it useless to keep offering the public the "auteur." In Venice, when I got the prize of the Golden Lion, I said that I probably deserve only the mane of this lion, and maybe the tail. Everything in the mid- dle should go to all the others who work on a picture: the paws to the director of photography, the face to the editor, the body to the actors. I don't believe in the solitude of... the auteur with a capital A.8

However, at the beginning ofJLG/JLG, Godard openly attests to the failure of all of his previous attempts to bring about his own demise. He also castigates himself for having laid claim to an action that he has not succeeded in perform- ing. Finally, Godard signals his determination to try again to engineer his suicide, and he makes clear that the realization of his auto-portrait depends upon the accomplishment of this event.

Since authorial suicide signifies slightly different things at different moments in Godard's filmmaking career, it is not immediately evident how we are to construe it here. However, later in JLG/JLG, in the scene where he ponders the meaning of the words "by JLG," Godard offers a clue. He suggests in voice-over that each of us has two homelands: the one that is given to us at birth, and the one that we create through negation. Although Godard provides no overt gloss upon the first of these homelands, he associates the second with "the negative

6. Godard discusses his attempt to divest himself of authorship during this period in "Deux Heures avecJean-Luc Godard," in Jean-Luc Godard parJean-Luc Godard, p. 335. 7. For a further elaboration of this reading of Numero deux, see Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 141-69. 8. Gideon Bachmann, "The Carrots Are Cooked: A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard," in Jean- Luc Godard: Interviews, p. 132.

21

OCTOBER

that Kafka spoke of, which was to be created."9 As he speaks, he also cuts first to the childhood photograph of himself, and then to an image of a clapboard held over a table with reels of film on it. He thereby implicitly connects the given homeland with his childhood, and the one created through negation with the cin- ematic signifier.

Godard first introduces the metaphor of a homeland in the intervening sequence in which he walks fully clothed in Lake Geneva, and Eddie Constantine utters the words from Germanio Anno Zero (1991): "Ah, my homeland: is it true? I have imagined you this way for a long time. Happy country, magic and dazzling- oh beloved land, where are you?" In the immediately following sequence, the camera tracks to the left along a row of books in Godard's study, lit with the orange light of a lamp. As the camera tracks, voices in three different languages speak over the image about the world of ideas. In so doing, they retrospectively characterize the beloved homeland that Eddie Constantine apostrophizes in Germania Anno Zero as the homeland of books. This sequence, thus once again, equates negation with the signifier, albeit now of a linguistic rather than a cine- matic sort.

Why does Godard associate the signifier with negation, and what precisely does the signifier negate? If the shot of the clapboard and tracking shot of the shelf of books were the only references to negation in JLG/JLG, I would be confi- dent in providing a psychoanalytic answer to this question. In order to occupy the homeland of language, I would argue, the artist must negate the homeland of the real; like the subject of whom Lacan speaks, his "being" must fade away.10 However, Godard embeds the concept of negation within a series of references to Mallarme. When these references are factored in, the linguistic or cinematic signi- fier seems to eclipse not the referent but rather the artist as an individual. The death of Godard as an author thus comes to signify his demise as a biographical personage.

The first of the references to Mallarme takes the form of the intertitles on white lined paper, which Godard intersperses with other images in JLG/JLG, as well as the many blank pages of such paper through which he rifles near the end of the film. Mallarme is fascinated with the white page as the material support of writing, and-as a consequence-with the arrangement of words across it as a graphic design. "One does not write luminously, on an obscure field," he writes in "L'Action restrainte," rather, "man pursues black on white."ll For Mallarm6, the white page also signifies a potentiality of writing in excess of any words that can be

9. Godard refers here to Kafka's The Metamorphosis. A variant of this line also appears in Nouvelle Vague. 10. For Lacan's most extended discussion of the eclipse of "being" induced by language, see Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 203-29. 11. Stephane Mallarme, "L'Action restrainte," quoted from Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crisis: Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching," in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 23.

22

The Author as Receiver

inscribed upon it: a kind of purity that written notations could only sully.12 In

JLG/JLG, the sheets of lined pages signify even more emphatically than Mallarm's white pages a surface for the writing of words. In their invocation of childhood school days, they also speak to a certain immaturity on the part of the writer-to his dependency upon preexisting lines to avoid going astray.

But at a crucial moment in the text, the white pages cease to be a metaphor for the material and formal support of Godard's writing, and grow into a metaphor for Godard himself. Immediately before the sequence in which Godard ponders the meaning of his own authorship, he shows us first an intertitle with the words "White paper is the true mirror of man," and then an image of the land- scape around Lake Geneva, shrouded in snow. With the intertitle and the shot of the snowy landscape, Godard erases himself as a bodily presence.

12. In a draft of a letter to Charles Morice, Mallarme writes: "The intellectual armature of the poem conceals itself and-takes place-holds together in the space that isolates the stanzas and amidst the white of the paper; significant silence that is no less beautiful to compose than poetry." In "Un Coup de des," he makes an even stronger claim on behalf of what is generally assumed to provide only the material support of language: "The.blank spaces, in effect, assume importance, strike first..." Both of these passages are isolated and translated by Marion Zwerling Sugano in her excellent discussion of Mallarme and the blank page, upon which I draw here. See The Poetics of the Occasion: Mallarme and the Poetry of Circumstance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 83-95. Other relevant texts by Mallarme are "La Declaration foraine" and "Prose."

23

OCTOBER

Ultimately, language also manifestly emerges as the agency for Godard's de- individuation. Late in the film, we glimpse him writing in black ink on a piece of

Son/Image letterhead stationery. The image is lit only by the flame of a series of matches, which Godard holds in his other hand. A montage of Lake Geneva and its environs follows, interspersed by titles written on lined paper. Over this

sequence, Godard says in voice-over:

When we express ourselves, we say more than we want to. We express the individual, but we speak the universal. I am cold. It is I who says: "I am cold." But it is not I who am heard. I disappear between these two moments of speech. All that remains of me is the man who is cold, and this man is everyone.... In speaking, I throw myself into an unknown, foreign land, and I become responsible for it. I have to become universal.

Here, too, Godard is in dialogue with Mallarme. In a May 14, 1967, letter to Henri Cazalis, Mallarme announced the death of himself as "the St6phane you knew" and his rebirth as an impersonal "capacity possessed by the spiritual Universe to see itself and develop itself, through what was once me."13

Interestingly, Mallarm6 characterizes his relationship to the spiritual universe

through the same verb that Godard uses in the opening sequence of JLG/JLG to characterize his relationship to the landscape of Rolles: the verb "to possess." Moreover, he too represents himself not as the possessor, but rather as the possessed.

Biographical erasure might seem radically incommensurate with the idea of an artistic self-portrait, but it is Godard's very phenomenological idea that the artist is not properly a creator, but rather the site where words and visual forms inscribe or install themselves. (I have recourse to the metaphor of inscription as well as that of installation because Godard himself sometimes thinks of the artist as a receptacle, and sometimes as a writing surface.) Neither of these actions can occur where the authorial ego reigns supreme, since this ego then occupies the place where the world should be. It is consequently only insofar as the artist suc- ceeds in negating himself as a biographical personage that he can truly be said to be an artist. Godard provides an explicit articulation of this idea in an interview in Le Monde. JLG/JLG, he claims, is

an auto-portrait, in the sense that the painters have practiced this exer- cise; not by narcissism, but as an interrogation on painting itself... art is greater than men, greater even than artists. ... Me, I always regarded

13. Stephane Mallarme, Selected Letters, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 74. Philippe Sollers also notes that Godard is in dialogue with this letter from Mallarme in

JLG/JLG in "JLG/JLG, un cinema de l'etre-la," in Cahiers du Cinema 489 (1996), p. 39.

24

The Author as Receiver

cinema as greater than I. JLG/JLG is an attempt to see what cinema can do with me, not what I can do with it.14

As Godard helps us to understand through a montage sequence early in

JLG/JLG, a self-portrait should consequently show not the artist himself, but rather what he perceives. This montage begins with a shot of an illuminated lamp in Godard's apartment. A moment later the camera dollies first to the lamp's watery reflection in an adjacent glass window, and then-after several intervening intertitles and shots from the interior of his apartment-to a video camera standing on Godard's dining-room table. The same scene is reflected in the viewfinder, which can be glimpsed through the window behind: the window and walls of the build-

ing across the street. This shot replicates the formal structure and colors of the

self-portrait with which JLG/JLG begins; it, too, shows a reflexive image-within-the- image, and it too is suffused with blue. Here, however, Godard as biographical author is present only through his absence, both from the larger frame of the

image, and from the frame within the frame. We see neither the JLG who repre- sents, nor the one who is represented, only what he sees.

14. This is quoted from Godard byJean-Michel Frodon in his essay "JLG/NYC," in Le Monde, 10 May, 1994.

25

OCTOBER

In "The Death of the Author," Roland Barthes suggests that after his bio- graphical death Mallarm6 was reborn as a "scriptor." Like Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, he could only "imitate a gesture that [was] always anterior ... mix writ- ings, [and] counter the ones with the others."15 As should be clear by now, with this notion of the scriptor we reach the explanatory limit of JLG/JLG's various ref- erences to Mallarme. The Godard who lives on after his authorial death is not a scriptor, but rather a receiver. What he receives is language itself, which now emerges as the veritable agent both of speech and writing. Finally, in JLG/JLG lan- guage enjoys a radically expanded meaning. It includes not only the linguistic and cinematic signifier, but also sensory perception of all sorts.

JLG/JLG begins with a ringing telephone, and this sound is a repeated one elsewhere in the film. The first time we see the adult Godard in the film, it is shortly after the prolonged ringing of one telephone, and the sound of him speak- ing to the caller. As the camera cuts to an extreme long shot of him sitting at a desk, the telephone again begins to ring. Godard's apartment is also the site for the reception of an enormous amount of other stimuli. Television and videotapes play constantly on large video monitors, and at one point we are made privy to the organizing principles of the vast video library. Godard also repeatedly shows him- self reading aloud from books he has pulled off the shelf, and gazing at reproductions of famous paintings. Surprisingly, the images of Lake Geneva and the surrounding landscape, which would seem to be the most personal images in the film, also came to Godard from someone else-from a photographer he paid to shoot footage of his own childhood landscape.16

In a 1983 interview, Godard demonstrates a remarkable self-consciousness about his aesthetic project. "I am a person who likes to receive," he says there; "the camera, for me, cannot be a rifle, since it is not an instrument that sends out but an instrument that receives. And it receives with the aid of light."17 Godard is equally explicit about his status as a receiver in JLG/JLG itself. At the end of one of the sequences in which he reads aloud from other people's texts, he draws on a large piece of blank paper his own version of the two superimposed triangles with which Lacan schematizes the field of vision in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. With this double triangle, Lacan helps us to visualize the secondari- ness of the viewer to what he sees-to understand that "perception is not in [him]," but rather in "the objects that [he] apprehend[s]."18 By means of light, as Lacan puts it elsewhere in the same work, things paint themselves on the specta- tor's eyes.19

15. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146. 16. Smith, "Jean-Luc Godard," p. 185. 17. Bachmann, "The Carrots Are Cooked," p. 137. 18. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 80. 19. Ibid., p. 96.

26

The Author as Receiver

Although Godard uses the superimposed triangles to clarify the transmission of sound rather than light, he too emphasizes the projective nature of the percep- tual stimulus, and the receptive position of himself-as-perceiver. Godard introduces this sequence with a rhyme that includes his own childhood name: "And nowJeannot, Jeannot-which rhymes with stereo." He then goes on to sug- gest that the phonetic similarity of "Jeannot" and "stereo" is indicative of a more profound relation. "I, who listen and watch," he says, in obvious reference to his stereo, "am here, because I receive this projection as I face it."

The notion of the artist as a receiver represents a much more radical recon- ceptualization of authorship than might at first appear. Since Brecht, the predominant metaphor through which alternate forms of authorship have been imagined is the producer.20 Brecht-and, by extension, political filmmakers and critics of the '60s and '70s, for whom Brecht was a crucial reference point-privi- leged this metaphor for its materialist ramifications. The notion of the artist as a producer, which is also the trope Godard himself uses in Numro deux, aligns art with work rather than inspiration or creation; relegates the artist to the status of a laborer; and allows for a more collective and at times even de-anthropomorphic notion of the conditions under which an artwork comes to be. The author as pro- ducer is nevertheless still a molder, a shaper, a maker. The artist as receiver does not act in any of these ways. Indeed, he seems not to do much of anything.

The production metaphor derives much of its polemical force from its opposition to the metaphor of "consumption," which has dominated twentieth- century discussions of aesthetic reception. In Brecht's own writings, bourgeois art is a "culinary" or confectionary art: it invites its spectators to "eat" it.21 His own epic theater, on the other hand, not only makes producers of the actors, the direc- tor, and the set designer, but also ideally does the same with its spectators. "Our representations must take second place to what is represented," Brecht writes in "A Short Organum for the Theatre," "and the pleasure felt in their perfection must be converted into the higher pleasure felt when the rules emerging from this life in society are treated as imperfect and provisional. In this way the theatre leaves its spectators productively disposed even after the spectacle is over."22

The notion of reception has been rendered problematic within political theory and practice because of its apparent association with resignation as well as inactivity. To be in a receptive relation to external stimuli is assumed to imply a passive acceptance in the face of the "given." Not only within the writings of Brecht, but

20. Brecht speaks in "A Short Organum for the Theatre" of his "passion for producing" (Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett [New York: Hill and Wang, 1957], p. 185), and in general uses metaphors of production frequently. Walter Benjamin also titles his essay on Brecht "The Author as Producer" (Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott [New York: Schocken Books, 1978], pp. 220-38). 21. See Brecht, "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre," in Brecht on Theatre, p. 35. 22. Brecht, "A Short Organum for the Theatre," pp. 204-5.

27

OCTOBER

also within all of those discourses that can be ranged under the rubric of post- structuralism, the predominant impulse has been a directly contrary one: to

challenge "givenness" at every turn. Those of us who have labored within the field of post-structuralist theory have been at pains to demonstrate the cultural deriva- tion of even what is most seemingly natural. And what is of cultural derivation, we have been hasty to add, can be completely transformed.

In JLG/JLG Godard radically reconceives the category of the "given." He sug- gests that what presents itself to us in this way may sometimes be not the product of our own naturalizing activity, but rather a gift. As has already been pointed out

by Heidegger, whom Godard invokes several times in JLG/JLG, this understanding of "givenness" is inherent in the German language.23 In German, one does not say "there is," or "there are," but rather "es gibt," which literally means "it gives." This is not a theological account of Being. When a German speaker says "es gibt die Blumen," which we would translate as "there are flowers," she does not impute the existence of the flowers to an external agent. The "es" in "es gibt" is empty. " Es gibt die Blumen" means that the flowers are in the form of a giving, perhaps even in the form of a self-giving.

In addition to invoking Being and Time, and thereby Heidegger's account of

Being in JLG/JLG, Godard also puts into the mouth of his blind negative-cutter an edited amalgamation of a number of passages from Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. This cluster of passages, which she delivers in the form of a mono- logue late in the film, is devoted to the concept through which Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes his own version of Being: what he calls the "flesh" of the world. "If my left hand can touch my right hand, as it touches things," the passage quoted by the negative-cutter reads,

touch it touching, why, touching the hand of another, will I not be touching the same power of joining the things that I touched with mine? Now, the domain, we quickly realize, is limitless, if we can show that flesh is an ultimate idea, that it is neither union nor composition of two substances, but can be conceived in itself. If the visible has a relation to itself that traverses me, that constitutes me as I watch, watching this circle, which I do not create, but which creates me, this winding of the visible within the visible can traverse, animate other bodies, as well as mine. And if I could understand how this wave is born in me, how the visible over there is also my landscape, I can under- stand that elsewhere too it closes on itself, and that there are other landscapes than my own.24

23. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, "The Nature of Language," in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1 971), pp. 87-88. 24. For the passages that comprise the basis for this monologue, see Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 140-41.

28

The Author as Receiver

With this monologue, Godard suggests once again that the seen precedes the seer-that our perceptions are a gift from elsewhere. Extraordinarily, he also maintains that the seer himself emerges out of what he sees: that the visible world not only gives itself to him, but gives him to himself.

Godard also reconceptualizes the "given" in JLG/JLG through a series of ref- erences to his own 1990 film, Nouvelle Vague.25 Already in the opening sequence he plays a few bars from the musical score of that film, and the subsequent visual, ver- bal, and musical citations are vast. Godard cites this film so often because it provides an extended meditation upon giving. In the first half of Nouvelle Vague, Elena showers Lennox with gifts, and in the second half he does the same with her. Most of the time these gifts work to debilitate and indebt the recipient. However, on two occasions a pure gift is given-a gift that bankrupts neither the giver nor the receiver and stands outside the psychodynamics of power. The first time this gift is given is when Elena saves Lennox from his automobile accident. The second of these occasions occurs at the very end of the film, when Lennox saves Elena from drowning.

The most important reference to Nouvelle Vague in JLG/JLG occurs during the twilight scene when Godard reads aloud from two Jean-Paul Toulet books. As he moves from his bookshelves to his desk, at which he will sit when reading, we hear the central character from Andre Bresson's The Diary of a Country Priest (1951) describing his last conversation with the dead Countess, presumably from an off- screen video monitor. "I said to her, 'Go in peace,"' he recounts, "and she received this peace on her knees. O miracle that one can give what one does not oneself possess." Godard provides a variant of these lines in the scene in Nouvelle Vague where Elena rescues Lennox from his traffic accident. As Lennox, who is lying on the ground, reaches his hand up to that of the woman standing above him, she says: "How wonderful to give what you don't have," and he responds: "Miracle of empty hands."26 As these two characters speak, Godard shows the two hands reaching toward each other in close-up against the blue, brown, and green of the landscape behind. The image of one hand reaching out to another recurs in the second drowning scene and is the central metaphor in Nouvelle Vague.

Godard also reconceives what it means to receive in JLG/JLG, and here, too, Nouvelle Vague figures centrally. Godard re-semanticizes the act of receiving in part through the already-cited passage from The Diary of a Country Priest, where "to receive" means to die in peace. He also reverts frequently to the musical theme

25. For an extended discussion of giving and receiving in Nouvelle Vague, see Silverman and Farocki, Speaking About Godard, pp. 197-227. 26. Here and elsewhere I have consulted the text of Nouvelle Vague published in LAvant-Scene Cinema, 396/397 (1990).

29

OCTOBER

that he plays in the scene in Nouvelle Vague in which Elena dances with Lennox in the living room of her house. In this scene, Elena describes everything that she plans to offer Lennox. "I'll work for you the livelong day," she promises him, "At night you'll reproach me for my faults." However, it is not Lennox who then mani- fests gratitude to her, but rather she who manifests it to him. "Thank you for receiving," she quietly says. A moment later Godard shows Elena on her knees before Lennox, reaching up to him in gratitude. Here, "to receive" paradoxically emerges as a gift in its own right-perhaps the greatest gift any of us can confer upon another. It also emerges as an action, in the very strongest sense of that word. "To receive" is thereby divested of its false association with inactivity and resignation.

But we have not yet accounted for all of the transformations to which Godard attempts to subject himself in JLG/JLG. He seeks not merely to accept what has been given to him, but also to promote "love on earth." What are we to make of this puzzling ambition? An extraordinary passage from Godard's 1983 interview with Gideon Bachmann seems at first glance to clarify how an artist might promulgate earthly love. "The cinema is the love, the meeting, the love of ourselves and life, the love of ourselves on earth, it's a very evangelical matter, and it's not by chance that the white screen is a canvas," he says there. "In my next film, I want to use it in this way, the screen as the linen of Veronique, the shroud that keeps the trace, the love, of the lived, of the world."27 Godard here characterizes cinema in terms very similar to those through which Andre Bazin describes the photograph in "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." Because of the recep- tive properties of film emulsion and the silver screen, cinema bears the imprint of what it records. It is consequently able to pierce the "spiritual dust and grime" with which our eyes normally cover what they look at and to present it in all of its "virginal" and loveable "purity."28

However, it is important to remember that Godard is speaking here about Hail, Mary (1985), not JLG/JLG. Although in the later film Godard continues to elaborate upon the ethics of reception, which he might be said to introduce with the first, he goes one step further. Rather than using film emulsion and the filmic screen as the linen of Veronique in JLG/JLG, he attempts to become himself not merely the blank page where the world writes itself and the receptacle housing sensory data, but also the reflecting surface that allows others to see what has been written. Through a series of additional references to Nouvelle Vague, JLG/JLG also redefines world love itself in a way that includes the human subject.

27. Bachmann, "The Carrots Are Cooked," p. 132. 28. Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 15.

30

The Author as Receiver

The larger figure traced by Nouvelle Vague is neither "giving" nor "receiving," but rather "reciprocity." Lennox might be said to give back to Elena in the second

drowning scene the gift that she gives him in the much earlier accident scene. In

JLG/JLG, Godard attempts to respond in a similar fashion to the gift of the world: to "reflect" back, as he puts it in theJeannot/stereo monologue, what is projected onto him. However, whereas in Nouvelle Vague the gift is returned punctually to the

sender, in JLG/JLG it bounces off in the direction of an infinity of other seers. The scene in which Godard elaborates most fully upon the reciprocity of giving

and receiving is the one in which the negative-cutter quotes from Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. Through her monologue, Godard brings together the two senses that are generally most opposed to one another-seeing and touching. "To see" comes to signify "to touch," and "to touch," "to see." Godard also insists

upon the reversibility of every act of seeing or touching. "In touching another per- son I touch someone who possesses the same power to touch me, just as in seeing another I see someone capable of seeing me," he in effect says. In addition, Godard communicates through the various passages he quotes from Merleau-

Ponty the idea that there are other seers than himself, and other prospects; what is true of himself is therefore true of all other subjects. Finally, Godard suggests that what is apprehended by one seer need not be closed off to others; cinema

31

OCTOBER

and other art forms can send off what one seer has seen in the direction of other seers. He metaphorizes the looping of the visible from one viewer to another through a close-up of a roll of negative film moving around the bobbins of his editing table, now overtly connecting it with cinema.

Does Godard succeed in becoming a pure receiver, receptacle, and reflector of stimuli, which have their origin elsewhere? He himself suggests not. Late in the sequence in JLG/JLG, in which he writes in the illumination provided by a match- stick, he looks at a Rembrandt image on a video monitor. He then says: "To realize, with humility, with precaution, by means of my own flesh, the universality into which I carelessly threw myself, that is my sole possibility, my sole command. I said that I love. That is the promise." After uttering these words, he cuts to another snowy image of the landscape around Rolles, in a reference back to the "white paper is the true mirror of man" intertitle. However, the competing interti- ties "the temptation to exist" and "I am a legend" show up shortly before this sequence, and even as Godard looks at the Rembrandt painting it gives way to the image of himself lighting a match.

Godard as biographical author also makes a series of additional comebacks, and must be repeatedly banished. A few shots after his image replaces the Rembrandt painting on the video monitor, Godard appears once again on the same monitor. Since on this occasion the "real" Godard extinguishes his match at the same time as his video counterpart, he is much more manifestly present both as authorial representer and authorial representation. Like the shot with which JLG/JLG begins, this shot consequently approximates a conventional self-portrait.

Godard then annihilates himself once more. In voice-over, he stages a con- versation between two men. The first man advises the second to ask himself what a government is. The second responds: "A group of people who govern." "No," says the other, "a government is your accepting to let yourself be governed." "But that's ridiculous," says the second, "that would mean there is nothing up there. Nothing at all." "Exactly," responds the first. With the last part of this exchange, the video monitor goes blank. Godard then utters the words "self-portrait" in voice-over, making evident that the joke constitutes an allegory for a very different kind of author than the one he has just revealed himself to be-for what might be called "the author-as-no-one."29

A moment later, though, we see Godard playing tennis, a game which occu- pies a central place in the filmmaker's legend, and which consequently signifies "biographical author." Godard further thematizes the tennis sequence through a

29. Godard is also in either witting or unwitting dialogue with Merleau-Ponty here, who says at a key moment in The Visible and the Invisible, "in a sense, as Valery said, language is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests" (p. 155).

32

The Author as Receiver

series of references to Nouvelle Vague, in whose closing moments a tennis joke is also made. One of these references takes the form of two intertitles with the words "the past is never dead, it hasn't even passed yet," which function simultane-

ously to evoke the repetitive structure of Nouvelle Vague's narrative and to suggest that Godard has not yet divested himself of his authorial mantle. The scene with the Latin-speaking woman follows, in which Godard expresses proprietary rights over her coat, and in which first she and then he lays claim to an artistic fame that will last throughout eternity. Immediately after this scene, an intertitle makes even more explicit the premature nature of Godard's claim to be dead as a biographical author: "He hasn't even passed yet" [my emphasis].

Over the turning pages of his lined notebook, Godard repeats the words "I said that I love. That is the promise." Although with the words "I love" Godard lays claim to an achieved condition, the word "promise" seems to signal something still to come. Then, as the camera cuts to a shot of green fields and trees, Godard

openly acknowledges that he is not yet ready for the Last Judgment. The love which he seeks both to practice and to promote does not yet exist, and his author- ial death still awaits him. Godard nevertheless assures us that what has not yet been accomplished lies in the immediate future. "Now I have to sacrifice myself so that through me the word 'love' means something, so that love exists on earth," he says in voice-over: "In recompense, at the end of this long undertaking, I will

33

OCTOBER

end up being he who loves. That is, I will merit the name I gave myself." But even this assertion seems unsustainable. The future cannot authenticate in the present a claim that one has already made in the past.

But perhaps it is wrong to see Godard's failure to achieve his goal for once and for all as the discreditation either of himself or his project. As we learn from Nouvelle Vague, all receiving and giving quickly succumbs to the logic of power and exchange; the gift of the world is consequently something we must learn over and over again to accept and to return.30 Like all egoic structures, biographical author- ship is also not something from which anyone can definitively emerge; as Lacan tells us in his first seminar, we can enter the imaginary register, but we cannot leave it.31 The death of the author is thus better understood as an ongoing process than as a realizable event. Once we make this semantic adjustment, the crucial question to ask of Godard is no longer whether he succeeds in laying his ghost definitively to rest in JLG/JLG. It is, instead, whether he is able to sustain himself there and elsewhere in the mode of dying. In spite of his repeated remissions and even temporary recoveries, the prognosis is clear: here is a patient who will always have at least one foot in the grave.

30. For an extended elaboration of the theoretical assumptions upon which this essay is based, see my World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 31. For Lacan's most extended discussion of the imaginary register, see his The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

34