Nudità senza spettatore

This paper means to examine the theoretical and visual trait of Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage (2014). The movie questions the efficacy of language for the orienting of the gaze. The matter is that the poverty of language can be pursued but cannot be obtained from within the language itself. On the contrary, the dog, the actual leading character of Godard’s movie, is not naked since he cannot help but be naked. In this sense, one can affirm that the appearances of the dog in Adieu au language represent the reversal of Franz Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog (1922, posthumously published in 1931). Whilst Kafka is the writer who approaches more closely the impersonality of the images, the dog “imprisoned” in his book never accomplishes the “goodbye to language”. After all, Kafka’s dog is identical to the woman undressing and dressing herself in the sitting room in Godard’s movie.