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 The Author as Receiver

KAJA SILVERMAN

Alain Bergala titled his 1985 collection of Godard's writings and interviews
Jean-Luc Godardpar Jean-Luc Godard.1He 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-LucGodardparJean-LucGodardmight 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/JLGis 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/JLGis 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 GodardparJean-Luc Godard,ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile, 1985). The
sequel to this volume has recently appeared under the title Jean-LucGodardparJean-LucGodard,Tome2:
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).

OCTOBER96, Spring2001, pp. 17-34. ? 2001 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

18 OCTOBER

All illustrations:
Jean-LucGodard.
Filmstillsfrom
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. "Workto
improve your acting, get under the skin of your character, have the role of.... Do
TheAuthoras Receiver 19

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/JLGas 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, NouvelleVague.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
 20 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/JLGis 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).
TheAuthoras Receiver 21

toward an authorial divestiture, with his reliance upon natural light, objetstrouves,
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."6The subsequent Numerodeux
(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 "byJLG,"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-LucGodardparJean-LucGodard,p. 335.
7. For a further elaboration of this reading of Numerodeux, see Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki,
SpeakingaboutGodard(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.
 22 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 GermanioAnno 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
GermaniaAnno Zeroas 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 TheMetamorphosis.

A variant of this line also appears in NouvelleVague.
10. For Lacan's most extended discussion of the eclipse of "being" induced by language, see Four
FundamentalConceptsof 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:Crisesof
Witnessingin Literature,Psychoanalysis,and History(New York:Routledge, 1992), p. 23.
The Author as Receiver 23

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 Poeticsof the Occasion:Mallarmeand the
Poetryof Circumstance(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 83-95. Other relevant texts by
Mallarme are "La Declaration foraine" and "Prose."
 24 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/JLGto
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, SelectedLetters,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/JLGin "JLG/JLG,un cinema de l'etre-la," in Cahiersdu Cinema489 (1996), p. 39.
The Author as Receiver 25

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.
 26 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."15As should be clear by now, with
this notion of the scriptor we reach the explanatory limit of JLG/JLG'svarious 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/JLGlan-
guage enjoys a radically expanded meaning. It includes not only the linguistic and
cinematic signifier, but also sensory perception of all sorts.
JLG/JLGbegins 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."17Godard is
equally explicit about his status as a receiver in JLG/JLGitself. 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-LucGodard," p. 185.
17. Bachmann, "The Carrots Are Cooked," p. 137.
18. Lacan, FourFundamentalConceptsof Psychoanalysis,p. 80.
19. Ibid., p. 96.
TheAuthoras Receiver 27

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 resignationas 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" (Brechton
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,AutobiographicalWritings,trans. Edmund Jephcott [New York: Schocken
Books, 1978], pp. 220-38).
21. See Brecht, "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre," in Brechton Theatre,p. 35.
22. Brecht, "A Short Organum for the Theatre," pp. 204-5.
28 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/JLGGodard 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 "esgibt,"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 "esgibt" is empty. "Es gibt
die Blumen"means that the flowers arein 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 theInvisible.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 Visibleand
theInvisible,trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 140-41.
TheAuthoras Receiver 29

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 itselfto him, but gives him to himself.

Godard also reconceptualizes the "given"in JLG/JLGthrough a series of ref-

erences to his own 1990 film, NouvelleVague.25Already 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 Vaguein 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 TheDiary of a CountryPriest(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 NouvelleVague.
Godard also reconceives what it means to receivein JLG/JLG,and here, too,
Nouvelle Vaguefigures centrally. Godard re-semanticizes the act of receiving in part
through the already-cited passage from The Diary of a CountryPriest, 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 NouvelleVague,see Silverman and Farocki,
SpeakingAboutGodard,pp. 197-227.
26. Here and elsewhere I have consulted the text of Nouvelle Vague published in LAvant-Scene
Cinema,396/397 (1990).
 30 OCTOBER

that he plays in the scene in NouvelleVaguein 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."27Godard 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 himselfnot
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 WhatIs Cinema?,trans.
Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 15.
The Author as Receiver 31

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
 32 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/JLGbegins, 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-
a
pies 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 Visibleand 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).
The Author as Receiver 33

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'snarrative 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: "Hehasn'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
 34 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.30Like 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 WorldSpectators(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
31. For Lacan's most extended discussion of the imaginary register, see his The Seminar ofJacques
Lacan, Book I: Freud'sPapers on Technique,1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).