Politics and Ontology of the Image

This essay proposes that, beyond the play of allusions, the pervasive and enduring references to Maurice Blanchot in Jean-Luc Godard's films constitute a "clandestine friendship," a constellation of elective affinities, and a debt that thinks the ontology and the politics of the image. It identifies a specific lineage in the troubling parallel of experiences between Blanchot and Godard, that of a "political passion" to borrow the expression Blanchot once used in a letter to Roger Laporte. A singular knotting of aesthetics and politics, this political passion is also closely intertwined with a political romanticism, and at times even with a "revolutionary romanticism" determined by a shared dialogue with German Romanticism and "a fragmentary demand" allied with the strength of protest and refusal

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Debt · Economics · Epistemology · Friendship · German · Linguistics · Literature · Ontology · Passion · Political science · Politics · Romanticism · Social science · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · French Historical and Cultural Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology