Politics and perversion (Pier Paolo Pasolini’s de Sade today)

Abstract

The article attempts to examine Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom, not only as an adaptation of Marquis de Sade’s work, but as a possible response to the problems of modern society, which reanimates fascism, no longer as political ideology, but as a “natural” form of contemporary human sensibility. Relying on his original “semiology of reality,” the expression of which is cinema, Pasolini’s film embodies the non-political logic of fascism as the logic of perversion, hidden behind the facade of political ideology. The article shows that Salo consistently contradicts the key principles of cinematic expressiveness of Pasolini’s theory itself, which focuses on moments in which “reality” reveals itself (acting as life itself). As a result, the film connects the unconnected - the shock of scenes of torture and sexual violence with a cultural allegory that anesthetizes effect of visual violence. For Pasolini, both violence and culture are mechanisms for analyzing the ephemeral substance of power, which inevitably generates some form of fascism and perversion, while de Sade is the discoverer of the basic sensual (plastic) syntagmas of power, embodied in the figure of the libertine. The sadistic libertinage, which combines the idea of freedom and the practice of torture, finds itself at the very heart of contemporary politics, its operative unconscious.

Keywords

• fascism
• politics
• perversion
• deviation
• violence
• torture
• libertine
• pasolini
• de sade