Even the latest investigation into the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, which took place between 1 and 2 November 1975 in Ostia, has been filed. This was decided by the magistrate accepting the demands of the prosecutors in Rome, because the five genetic codes found on the clothes that Pasolini was wearing that night “not attributable”. The investigation was reopened after a complaint by Guido Mazzon, cousin of the victim, in 2010. The process was against persons unknown. A void of truth and power that PPP had widely predicted. We represent here an interview, carried them in 2010 with the psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati.
Power and repression, a couple key. With the integration of desire in the sphere of affection or amusement, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, “it is the suppression itself to be repressed,” and thus “the company extended not individual liberty, but its control on the individual. ” Among the sudden acceleration of modernity, now disengaged from each opening to the other, the movement of desire seems now going around in circles, producing at most, new forms of enslavement and freedom imaginary. Perhaps, instead of “free”, we should simply avoid to “circumvent” the desire, measuring, weighing, placing it as an end and obligation?
Massimo Recalcati: The contemporary man, the man ipermodernofa increasingly difficult to be desired. This effort is now more widespread feeling of existential distress. Contrary to what some think hedonists, our is not the time of the liberation of desire. On the contrary, it is the time of the eclipse of desire. But “Eclipse of Desire” also means a form of dissociation novel – here is the anthropological mutation – between subject and unconscious. The subject, remember, it is to psychoanalysis the place of desire. There is less and less unconscious, there is less and less desire, there is increasingly difficult to be desired and there is increasingly flattening of subjectivity to the principle of performance. This principle of performance, however, is not what it described and analyzed by Herbert Marcuse, for example, in the 60s and 70s. The principle of performance hypermodern is a principle now Sadian, and this is where we can see the great foresight of the last Pasolini.
In fact this Pasolini sinks its analytical frameworks to a depth somewhat disconcerting, breaking the image of the subject through the prism of Sade (and part of Adorno) …
Massimo Recalcati: Sadian principle reduces the person, the man, in body parts, fragments of the body, as may be seen in Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Spare body, fragments of body , that instrument of enjoyment. The basic law that governs our society tends perverse, if by “perversion” we do not mean what happens in the bedroom or any author’s homosexuality, Pier Paolo Pasolini in this case. Perversion, for the psychoanalyst, is a treat that becomes a must. When pleasure becomes duty, obligation, imperative higher then kills desire.
Pasolini spoke of neo-capitalism and in the same years – precisely at a conference held at the State University of Milan, May 12, 1972 – Lacan dealt with the “discourse of the capitalist.” For both, the center of the scene there were now the new configuration of the capitalist system, compared to its historical origins and, especially, its dynamics of destruction of each bond grafted (also) by the proliferation of a wish with no limits … In a poem La religion of my time, Pasolini wrote: “More mode, other idols, / mass, not the people, / the mass / determined to be bribed / the world now faces, / and turns, with each screen, a each video / is drinking, pure horde that breaks / with pure formless greed / desire to join the party. / E s’assesta is where the New Capital wants. / Muta the meaning of the words: / who has spoken so far, with / hope, remains / backward, aged. “
Massimo Recalcati : The discourse of the capitalist is based on the elevation of pleasure to duty, under the slogan “having to enjoy”. The principle of performance, today, provided for enjoyment as a duty, as an obligation, as an obligation. Pasolini had foreseen this when he describes the consumer society. Of course, nothing new in this, because basically the Frankfurt School had already seriously analyzed the drift in consumption, but …. But Pasolini adds another element, not secondary: the question of the body.
Even happiness is enslaved to a dynamic nihilist, a new power. Think of the Decameron (1971), his first “success” of the public, where Pasolini seems to have lost all anxiety of the future, changing it in nostalgia. The recovery of the game – “it is no longer of humor and detachment from matter: this is just the game” will look at an interview with Dario Bellezza – The decision to focus on Neapolitan scenes, become key elements to understand a reversal articulated not exactly a one-way exchange, in its outlook. Cooled magma underclass, with “its internal charge of protest and rage”, the scene remains its complement: the joy, vitality, nature – without anger. Soon, however, even liveliness and vitality, that mysterious and intenua happiness, will be subsumed in the discourse of the capitalist. Already in the Canterbury Tales eros degrades …
Massimo Recalcati : The happiness that the discourse of the capitalist offers is the result of a mixture between sexuality and death. When Pasolini and Lacan speak to a hell dimension of neo-capitalism meant precisely this: the iperedonismo borders on death drive, which are two sides of the same coin. Here is another aspect absent in the Frankfurt School, but this in Lacan and Pasolini. Another reflection is missing in the Frankfurt School, though they were – as Pasolini, the rest – the careful goers text of Freud is that of life and body. Instead, Pier Paolo Pasolini are questions about what happens in the body and in life when you experience this transformation of power introduced by the neo-capitalism at the scene.
And at the same time In addition to being subject to analysis, the body is an instrument of struggle declined to the future. Pasolini writes:
“… I would only live
although poet
because life is expressed even with herself.
I would like to express myself with the examples.
Throw my body in the fight. “
What antagonism refers to this body thrown forward, thrown – as Pasolini, which borrows the verse the slogan of the Black Panthers – “into the struggle”?
Massimo Recalcati: In the neo-capitalism the problem is no longer a class antagonism between the power / capital and the exploited masses. The problem is rather that of an integration of the masses in the capillary system of the same power. A plasmation unpublished, no antagonism, which cancels the subversive dimension of integrating it into a mass conformism so desperate as ever.
The January 7, 1973, on BBC ; Pasolini published an article highly controversial from the title, “Against long hair”, introducing the concept of sign monolithic … Another sign of the capacity encompassing and seductive power?
Massimo Recalcati: The long-haired, said Pasolini then, is one who imagines break a pattern or a cliché introducing through the body, a stigma of the body, something that comes out of the body . This stigma is specifically the hair long but it is transformed into a sign monolithic , which is a divided, by a system that has become plastic. A system that knows how to neutralize the subversive element when it receives, and makes it fashion . The same happens in anorexia: the lean, wiry, death, which claim to come into antagonism with the discourse of the capitalist – the man does not live by bread alone, it seems to affirm the anorexic. On the one hand, this is a speech antagonist, for the other system does turning back in the speech of the body fashionable, thin, thread-like note. The fashion industry neutralizes this protest lean body, doing the same uniforms, a sign monolithic .
The body that paradoxically it “expresses” through fashion ( conforming its codes) is a body blank, because it revealed, stripped, saturated unlikely desires. In a square full of young, Pasolini wrote, soon “no longer be able to distinguish, from his body, a worker from a student, a fascist by a fascist.” The fashion is therefore the body, not the suit, reducing it to silence and zero degree of his expression?
Massimo Recalcati: Of course. There is a commonplace of the clinic, according to which the anorexic body is on this side of sexual difference. Cliché that has its value: one of the problems that we find in the anorexic is the attempt to deny the sessuazioni, then level the body in the sexual forms to hold him on this side. One of my patients I have, however, suggested another idea: look, I said, I’m not a little girl, on this side of sexual difference. Instead, I said, I am a Martian, are beyond, are after . It is not simply a regression, but it is an overcoming of the body.
In another interview given to Gideon Bachmann and Donata Gallo, Pasolini observed that the power of neo-capitalist “manipulates bodies so horrible and it has nothing to envy to the manipulation made by Hitler: manipulates transforming consciousness, ie the hard way; establishing new values alienated and false, which are the values of the consumer; Marx defines what happens: the genocide of cultures living, real, earlier. ” We could push the speech a little ‘further, toward a universe “post”, and consider ourselves contemporaries of a mutation has occurred. A universe also post-sexual so …
Massimo Recalcati: Let’s focus on the significance of post-sexual. What does it mean? It means that the object that interests me is no longer the human partner, but it is the inanimate object, the object inhuman, my image in the mirror, the food, technology objects. This is the posthuman that the anorexic hypermodern highlights not so much and not only a regression to the body before the sessuazioni, but an overcoming of sexualization as a place of symbolic exchange between humans . Sexuality is transformed into a mineral body. All forms of discomfort – depression, panic disorder, bulimia, obesity, drug addiction in particular – are forms in which the subject divorced from sexual body. And so divorced from sexuality – Pasolini theme – as a place of exchange and you opt to partner inhuman, that the various substance that the speech of the capitalist offers unlimited. Substances intended as partners: the food, the body image, the psychiatric drug … There is a multiplication in offering these inhuman partners that solve the complex problem of the link, dissolving it.
We return to the dissolution of the capitalist discourse that is – as it may seem paradoxical – a speech of s-link …
Massimo Recalcati : The discourse of the capitalist, according to Lacan, is based on certain principles. The first is the foreclosure of castration: the discourse of the capitalist gives the illusion that there is no limit. It is a speech that also affects science and Pier Paolo Pasolini was very experienced on this point and on the mirage of progress that has no limits and, therefore, becomes a form of barbarism. There is no sense of limits – foreclosure of castration. But the discourse of the capitalist follows another principle: put aside the “things of love.” Does not deal with love and love is the main form of connection to a community. In contrast, the discourse of the capitalist sponsors a cynical relationship with the object. Third point is hyperactivity, which is the speed of hell – says Lacan – with which the discourse of the capitalist moves and offers his goods. This aspect of hell is most present in Pasolini and in what he called neo-capitalism. The theme of love is most present in him. While most problematic is the aspect of foreclosure of castration, whereas in Pasolini is perceptible a roussoianesimo bottom, namely the idea that progress as such is bad, because it moves away from the origin and, therefore, from an assumption state of nature.
The myth of the origin is present in the Tramp (1961), but in toto Decameron , shot ten years later, in 1971. If in Tramp or Mamma Roma (1962) was still perceptible – words of Pasolini – an air of social protest with the consequent “the will of awareness,” the Decameron represents the “longing of a people ideal, with its poverty, its lack of political consciousness (it’s terrible to say, but it’s true), of a people that I met when I was a kid. ” Yet even here, even in the search for a ” ontology of reality, whose symbol naked is sex, “Pasolini not stop trying. Perhaps, he says, “this people still exists, in the belly of Naples.” If a revolutionary force remains, is, in all Trilogy of Life , a “scandalous power of the past” …
Massimo Recalcati : Certainly. It is a dimension that Pasolini research underclass Friulian or Roman, the peoples of the Third World, in Naples (think Gennariello) in an attempt to find a source uncorrupted compared to historical time that would inevitably feature of this corrupt innocence origin, that is a mirage Pasolini. Let us remember the words that Pasolini put in your mouth to director Orson Welles, in the Ricotta (1963): “I am a force of the Past. / Only in the tradition is my love. / I come from the ruins, churches, / the altarpieces, the villages / abandoned in the Apennines or the Alps, / where the brothers lived. “
However, a point, Pasolini himself understands – drastically, but at the same time highly contradictory, as its usual-that is no longer possible elsewhere that you can not go home, because the ‘last figure of the capital has dissolved all otherness.
Massimo Recalcati : In the last Pasolini is in fact too dream of desperate vitality that remains without the side of that dream, not what could be called “ghost”. The ghost Pasolini coincided, at least up to a certain point, with myth in almost roussoiano innocence origin. Then, last Pasolini there is a jump.
Even topologically, because the political space traced by this jump no more the “Palace” on one side and ” square “on the other, that is corruption and origin. When we speak of “last Pasolini” However, we should remember that the last Pasolini is certainly one of Oil (although you should open a separate discussion on the condition of “posthumous prophet”), but also that , perhaps more naive, certainly more article about fireflies schematic, published in the pages of the main newspaper of the Italian bourgeoisie, the BBC ….
Maximum Recalcati : The strength of Pasolini is precisely in its being what we would call a Lacanian subject divided. Pasolini work with the division. All his statements are “divided” is a Marxist, but not an atheist; is a layman who, however, abortion takes an abnormal position; is a Gramscian, is for historical materialism, however, he thinks that life is reduced to the size of the story; is a writer who works on gender, is contrary to the experimentalism, however, does a job that is on the tongue of an extraordinary refinement. It appeals to the past – “I am a force of the past …” – and on the other hand recognizes that the past is a myth that you are deconstructing. Its strength is in this division.
And yet, without the myth of the origin, not the past (rewritten, reinvented, reactivated in his office in contrast to the line then you inexorably straight believed “progress without development”) would not be possible for him no nostalgia for the future … The bank has served to launch. To throw his “body in the fight” …
Massimo Recalcati : Ours is a time without memory, and this is a cultured thoroughly the work of Pasolini. Because the speech of the capitalist claims the cult of the new sensation, the feeling destroys the experience and, therefore, makes it impossible for the memory. In Pasolini, because of the awareness of the stakes, there is a constant attention, a constant attempt to work on memory and the past.
An attempt was also going against this, if We consider our as the era in which consumes definitely the experience of every possible experience …
Massimo Recalcati : There is a definition of Giorgio Agamben, in Childhood and History , which would invite you to reflect on: drug addiction is destroying experience. Drug addiction is one of the most paradigmatic of the feeling that destroys the experience of ecstasy that destroys the memory size.
An ecstasy disruptive, then. The same power?
Massimo Recalcati : On the one hand, it is clear that we have read in the key of Pasolini Foucault: the power that It needs to subjects, but of consumers. On the other, however, it is in Salo , and, above all, in the Writings pirates , we Pasolini that identifies the height of power is the destruction of the Law. This key is an actuality extraordinary: the height of power is anarchy.
As in ‘ Eliogabalo (1934) Artaud: l’ Emperor is a “anarchiste couronné”, an anarchist crowned.
Massimo Recalcati : The full power is anarchy. The height of power is the dissolution of the same Act, because the only law that power can contemplate is that of enjoyment without limits.
This idea that power is structurally anarchist and that the only law of power is the destruction of all forms of law, providing a snap psicoanalistica incredibly current, politically. We think, just to give an example, the transition from the so-called First, Second Republic, but pensiamolo through images of De Gasperi or Berlinguer, where the sacrifice of drives was evident, but equally obvious were references to a law, in a community , a best interests of the community, all forms designed to ensure and enable the pact. In Berlinguer, for example, the sacrifice drives came up to a certain form of asceticism, today is all upside: there is no longer provided, because power reveals his face anarchist. The law does not constitute more on containment, but the expansion of enjoyment: the laws ad personam are an example and, beyond the contingencies, have this dimension epochal. Pasolini had caught perfectly this anarchic face of power and the law.
is a phenomenon only Italian?
Massimo Recalcati : No, with some exceptions (Obama, in my opinion) is a trend. Why is this a trend in society. We think of the families and the difficulty of passing a speech on the border, this problem involves the educational discourse as such, and it is increasingly difficult to counteract the imperative “Enjoy!”, “Have fun!”. There is a parallel logic and who embodies or rides this logic, which runs through several levels of our society, get consent. But this is not because, as I know, Berlusconi “manipulates” the media, then get consensus. No it does not. Berlusconi achieves consensus, because it creates a certain representation of enjoyment. A cynical representation of enjoyment, to put Pasolini, coincides with the anarchy inherent in power.
follow me via twitter
* This interview is taken from the special issue “Tribute to Pasolini” the monthly magazine Communitas , n. 49/2011
No comments:
Post a Comment