The Author as Receiver

Abstract

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 discursive 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 position of the enunciator. The slash separating the two sets of initials in the title JLG/JLG is not a synonym for 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 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 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. 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