For an analysis of Here and Elsewhere as it relates to the movement of Third Worldism and Godard’s engagement with Palestine, see Irmgard Emmelhainz, “From Third Worldism to Empire: Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question,” Third Text 100 (September 2009), 100th Anniversary Special.
See Serge Daney, “Le thérrorisé (Pédagogie godardienne),” Cahiers du Cinéma nos. 262–263 (January 1976): 32–39; and Raymond Bellour, L’entre-images Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo. (Paris: La Différence, 1990).
“On a fait comme pas mal de gens. On a pris des images et on a mis le son trop fort. Avec n’importe quelle image: Vietnam. Toujours le même son, toujours trop fort, Prague, Montevideo, mai soixante-huit en France, Italie, révolution culturelle Chinoise, grèves en Pologne, torture en Espagne, Ireland, Portugal, Chili, Palestine, le son tellement fort qu’il a fini par noyer la voix qu’il a voulu faire sortir de l’image.” Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), 55 min, Chicago: Facets Video, 1995. Emphasis mine.
Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, L’Héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 201.
Adorno’s Commitment was originally published in 1962 as both a radio address and a journal article. In 1968 a number of US protests against the war in Vietnam used Guernica as a peace symbol. A year earlier, some 400 artists and writers petitioned Picasso: “Please let the spirit of your painting be reasserted and its message once again felt, by withdrawing your painting from the United States for the duration of the war.” In 1974, Toni Shafrazi spray-painted the words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s iconic painting. See Picasso’s Guernica, ed. Ellen C. Oppler (New York and London: Syracuse University Press, 1988). The symbolic power of Guernica was further highlighted in January 2003 when a reproduction of the painting in the UN headquarters was covered during Colin Powell’s presentation of the case for invading Iraq to the Security Council. This blocked the production of images (by the press) of the Security Council with the reproduction in the background.
Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtam (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965), 4. First published in France in 1947.
See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review vol. 1, no. 62 (July–August 1970) 84-85. For Jacques Derrida, Guernica’s denunciation of civilized barbarism occurs in a dead silence that allows one to hear the cry of moaning or accusation. This cry joins the screams of the children and the din of the bomber. See Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Fall 1985), 290-301.
See Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, Volume Two, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber-Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 76-94.
This is Adorno and Pierre Macherey’s position regarding the relationship between aesthetics and politics. For Macherey, art has an end insofar it presupposes a subjective pact between viewer and author based on general trust: the author’s word is to be believed, the receiver’s is an act of faith. Before the work appears, there is an abstract space presupposing the possibility of the reception of the author’s word. See Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: François Maspero, 1966), 89-91. Thierry de Duve posits the problem of art as an end via Kant’s aesthetic judgment, arguing that “the notion of artists speaking on behalf of us is essential to art as art, and its legitimacy does not hinge on the artist’s purportedly universal mandate but rather on the artwork’s universal address.” (My emphasis) See Thierry de Duve, “Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?,” in Voici -100 d’art contemporain (Brussels: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001).
Jean-Paul Sartre et al., On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 288-340.
Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 114-116.
“People seize speech and keep it.”
See Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media” (1972), New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 280.
See Brecht’s “The Radio as an Apparatus for Communication” (1932); Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”; Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “Constituents of the Theory of the Media,” in The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 95-128; and Baudrillard’s critique of this position in “Requiem for the Media,” ibid.
Baudrillard, ibid.
“N’importe quelle image quotidienne fait partie d’un système vague et compliqué, où le monde entier entre et sort à chaque instant.”
“Le cinéma ce n’est pas une image après l’autre, c’est une image plus une autre qui en forment une troisième, la troisieme étant du reste formée par le spectateur au moment où il voit le film.” Godard in “Propos Rompus,” Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: L’Étoile et Cahiers du cinéma, 1985), 460.
See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 180.
Gilles Deleuze, “Trois questions sur Six fois deux: A propos de Sur et sous la communication,” Cahiers du Cinéma 271 (November 1976).
Here I am taking after the linguist Oswald Ducrot who argues that the talking subject introduces sentences (in enunciation) that necessarily contain the responsibility of the utterer; in other words, in enunciation the speaker is committed to the semantic content. That is why for Ducrot, speech acts constitute expression. See Oswald Ducrot, Logique, structure, énonciation: Lecture sur le langage (Paris: Minuit, 1989); and Les mots du discours (Paris: Minuit, 1980).
From the voiceover in Here and Elsewhere.
According to Jacques Derrida, in the domain of écriture there is a movement in language at its origin, which conceals and erases itself in its own production. This means that in écriture the signified always already functions as a signifier. With écriture, Derrida undermines the Aristotelian idea of theLogos as the mediation of mental experience along with the movement of “exteriorization” of the mental experience as a sign of presence. The function ofécriture is, therefore, to conceptualize the dissolution of the signifier in the voice by splitting signified and voice: in écriture, the subject of a text is coherent with the text, becoming the object of écriture, displacing the signified from the author. See Derrida’s Of Grammatology, corrected edition, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).