Salò - Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975) |
"What attracts Pasolini to Sade is his decoding of a priori concepts like normalcy, commonality, equivalence, and morality in order to expose these very concepts as themselves the real scandal, an outrageous emptiness — the unaccountable system of moral and economic isomorphism. This deconstruction of concepts that foster stable social identities causes the collapse of the three-tiered construction of the social apparatus bound by a social contract: first, the conscience and credulity with regard to a supreme being; second, the obligation to fellow man or civil society; and third, self-interest (Philosophy of the Bedroom, 308-310). And by subtracting the irrational (a priori) figures of God, good, moral, Sade vindictively unveils reason's own fatal strategy, its own nihilistic will to power that disassembles 'other' desire and reassembles desire as a mechanized destructive reaction compulsion. Driving this fatal strategy is the fusion of contradictions, authority that falsifies its own image and discourse, operating outside of the law upon which it derives its power, and acting out it's desire for pure control as a desire purely to defile. Salò presents both the outbreak of evils well as the victory over evil, the passing of transgression into law. This film visualizes the Baudrillardian paradigm of the simulated society where every subversion of the system merely promotes its deterrence, which in turn reinforces an insubstantial masquerade of public good. The decoding of this masquerade leads Pasolini to the Sadean axiom, the institutionalization of transgression (a fatal strategy). Within this axiom the law is presented as schizophrenic, speaking in the name of the father, the patria, the state in order to completely nullify the discourse of the father, the patria, the state — or at least reveal that these discourses are already bankrupt. This manifold law devours meaning, excreting itself in the form of abjection, which is defined by modern critics such as Julia Kristeva as 'any crime, since it draws attention to the fragility of the law.' Yet, in contrast to thinkers like Kristeva who specifically exclude Sade from the moral politics of abjection on the grounds that 'he who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law,' Pasolini proposes that the institutionalization of transgression or the aggrandizement of subversion disavows speculative discourses (like Kristeva's) that reserve for the strategy of subversion some sacred or moral purpose. Regardless whether abjection is aggrandized as the law (Sade) or an undermining of law (Kristeva), it conserves a notion of the host as a 'pure body' that can be defiled."
An excerpt from chapter 3 of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics: Salò (A Fatal Strategy) - Kris Ravetto
Il Presidente / Salò - Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975) |