Touching the Virgin. On the politics of intimacy in Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary

This paper is guided by a conviction common to Godard and Merleau-Ponty: namely, that the special power of art is its ability to show up for us the invisible, what was previously unseen, and thereby to shape intimately, to transform, our own perceptions of the world. Art can thereby bring us into a more intimate contact with reality. With reference especially to Godard's film Hail Mary, the paper argues that Godard distinguishes between two ways of approaching the human body: on the one hand, it can be approached as prostituted thing - which has the effect of developing in the prostituted person a kind of absence to herself and to others, a dispossession of herself and an anesthesia to her own and others' affective life. On the other hand, the human body can be approached as sacredly human - in which case we will touch that body very differently, expressing our presence to its embodied divinity precisely by withdrawing our touch and leaving space for its own desires. It is proposed that Godard's filmmaking aims at precisely this kind of withdrawal and letting be, and that thereby he awakens his viewers to, makes them more intimate with, the sacred in the human.