Separation, Difference, and Time in Godard’s Ici et ailleurs

Is it possible to conceive a language of absolute difference? Or, is absolute difference always complicated by the identity-function of language? These questions have occupied French philosophy at least since Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. In what follows, I renew the problem of heterology with attention to Jean-Luc Godard’s film Ici et ailleurs, released in 1976. I will argue that Godard’s treatment of space, space-time, and time—especially the latter, in the figure of the corpse—opens another modality of philosophical language, one sufficient to the task of articulating absolute difference.