Agamben and Godard: the Messianic task of cinema

Abstract

This is an essay originally published in Portuguese in the week of the death of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, in September 2022. Using an analogue methodology, this general objective of this text is to draw a parallel between Godard's short film, called Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993), and the concept of a state of exception developed by Giorgio Agamben, based on his project Homo sacer (1994-2014). The civil war between Serbs, Bosnians and Croats, in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, in the 1990’s, was a contemporary theme both for the Godard’s film and for the publication of the first volume of Agamben's Homo sacer series, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1994), which celebrated 30 years of its first publication. Thus, considering this striking geopolitical fact in the period after the end of the Soviet Union, this text seeks to answer the question of whether there would be any other relationship between the works of Agamben and Godard. The hypothesis is that Godard and Agamben, through an aesthetic-cinematic form and through a theological-political arguments, developed truth essays on the relationship between exception and rule, in addition to developing, based on Walter Benjamin, the concept of “Messianic task of cinema”.