Deleuze and Roxy: The Time of the Intolerable and Godard’s Adieu au langage

Focusing specifically on Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental 3-D outing, Adieu au langage (2014), this chapter equates becoming-animal (manifested through Godard’s dog, Roxy) with the time of the intolerable, a crisis in the action-image which precludes any absorption of affect within the sensory-motor schema. In this sense, Roxy becomes an immanent, animistic force that remakes the world (and by extension, as in all of Godard’s films, cinema itself) into a protean force of becoming, where even 3-D bifurcates and deterritorialises as a new form of machinic fabulation. In the case of the intolerable, where our sensory-motor schema is allowed to jam or break, a different type of image appears, what Deleuze calls a pure optical-sound image: ‘opsigns’ and ‘sonsigns’, images where the seen and heard no longer extend into action. In Adieu au langage, Godard’s use of 3D also offers a new kind of time-image, a lectosign (a visual image which must be ‘read’ as much as seen) that requires the eye’s negotiation of conflicting points of attention within the shot, thereby inducing crisis and the intolerable within the image itself.