Representing the Unrepresentable: Restitution, Archive, Memory

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of Godard’s debate with Claude Lanzmann (and others) on the matter of the representability of horror, catastrophe and trauma, as well as on his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba, for which Godard has been accused of anti-Semitism. Starting with a description of Godard’s Dantesque version of the twenty-first century foreshadowed by his short video-films of the 1990s: The Origin of the 21st Century (1999) and Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993), I elucidate how Sarajevo and the Balkans War became in the 1990s the paradigm of intervention elsewhere framed by “humanitarian solidarity” toward which Godard expresses clear ambivalence channeled through a critique of the “humanitarian intellectual.” I analyze how in Notre musique, for Godard, a politics of forgiveness and restitution channeled through the memory and culture industry is futile to bring about reconciliation. Vouching for poetry of the vanquished, for the Trojan poets bringing about hope, he vouches for a simple conversation, confronting two points of view as a means to start thinking about guilt and forgiveness, to rebuild the “parmi nous” and absolute derealization of the Other that is destroyed by the war of annihilation.