Jean-Luc Godard’s Europe: Digital Orientalism and Geopolitical Aesthetics

This essay contends that Jean-Luc Godard’s late digital cinema elaborates a geopolitical aesthetics in which Europe confronts the return of its repressed histories through the very instability of the digital image. While Europe has long functioned in Godard’s work as both theme and epistemic horizon—echoing the Hegelian cartographies—Film Socialisme (2010) and The Image Book (2018) transform this Eurocentrism into a site of crisis. In these films, what Fredric Jameson terms the “political unconscious” (1981) emerges through the spectral return of Palestine and the Arab world, compelling a reckoning with colonial legacies and the limits of representation. The digital turn proves decisive. Godard mobilizes pixelation, saturation, glitch, and decomposed sound to reveal what might be called the technological unconscious of the medium. I develop the concept of “Digital Orientalism” to designate how Orientalist chronotopes persist in the digital age yet are unsettled by Godard’s experimental manipulation of audiovisual fragments. Through close readings of Film Socialisme and The Image Book, which incorporates works by Arab filmmakers including Youssef Chahine, Nacer Khemir, Ossama Mohammed, and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, I show how Godard’s fractured montages produce symptomatic cartographies of the world-system where repression, memory, and accident collide.