Rethinking Salò After Abu Ghraib

 
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) notoriously transposes the narrative of the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 journées de Sodome from the waning years of eighteenth-century France to the spring of 1944 in the Republic of Salò, the German-occupied puppet state that was established in Northern Italy after Mussolini’s flight from Rome in 1943.¹ Yet the allegorical project of the film is more complicated than the historical analogy alone might suggest. As the scenes of the film progress, the visual trappings and reminders of Mussolini’s regime in fact disappear, as do the Nazi German troops who incongruously are shown operating in the service of the Italian Fascist dignitaries in a brief initial sequence. In homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pasolini divided the plot of Salò into three distinct “circles” (namely, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood), initially intending for these sections to correspond to three of the one hundred and twenty days chronicled in Sade’s brutal epic. In the finished film, however, the director abandoned this scheme of distinguishing the days in which the action unfolds, and only a few scenes derive their inspiration from the original Sadean scenario (Bachmann 71). Pasolini neatly translates the characters of the four aristocratic libertines whom Sade depicted living and operating in the château of Schilling into the modern archetypes of a banker, a duke, an archbishop, and a judge.
 
A heated controversy greeted the film’s preliminary screenings in 1975 due to its graphic portrayal of acts of rape, torture, and murder and its overt linkage of fascism and sadism. As a result, the general release of Salò in Italy occurred several years after post-production work on the film ended. In fact, government censors seized the release prints on November 12, 1975, just ten days after Pasolini’s murder in Ostia; as a result, the first public screening took place in Paris on November 23. It should be noted that Salò remains censored under anti-pornography or anti-obscenity laws in several countries to this day. To regard the film as an exercise in erotic arousal, however, is to obscure its actual argument. Pasolini’s impulse in Salò, Armando Maggi astutely remarks, is to desexualize Sade and to present us with modern-day libertines who “differ from Sade’s because they are expressions of a societal system, whereas in Sade the libertines defy the contemporary ruling system” (286–287).
 
Paraphrasing the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we might say that whereas Sade depicted a state of exception, Pasolini shows its consolidation into a rule. To put it another way: the filmmaker regarded the themes of his Sadean ur-text as a means to the end of mounting a specific political critique of modernity and of the growing ability of power to turn human bodies into objects. This critical undertaking, which runs through Salò and many of the last writings he completed before his death, suggests that Pasolini was one of the first thinkers to discern the emergence of a new field of conflict with its own distinct rules in the growing importance of biopower, even if he did not refer to the concept by this name but rather by his own idiosyncratic terms such as “the anthropological mutation” or “cultural genocide.” However, some readers have been put off by the fact that the tone of his polemic is “apocalyptic, not merely critical of Western society’s immorality,” to cite Maggi once again (258). To what extent must we regard Pasolini’s prophetic attitude as a self-aggrandizing tactic, as the irresponsible surplus value of poetic license? Should we not consider biopolitics rather than biopower to be the concept most relevant to our current conditions, as Hardt and Negri propose, since it seems historically inevitable that the multitudes eventually will be emancipated rather than disenfranchised by the contemporary forms of power?²
 
Watching Salò thirty years later, one finds that the film’s provocative aesthetic appeal has not notably changed. However, with regard to its ideologically scandalous position, its use of sexuality as a metaphor for power, the story is different. Saló, it turns out, shares the most troubling elements of its iconography with the photographic record of torture at Abu Ghraib.³ To revisit Salò in light of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the denial of legal rights to those interned at Guantanamo Bay is to ask whether the film’s apocalyptic scenario is best understood as an exploitative poeticizing of Sade or as a distressingly proleptic insight into the current methods of biopower.⁴ The film, in other words, may be read as a visionary exploration of the phenomenon of “horrorism,” a neologism introduced by Adriana Cavarero to highlight the vulnerability and exposure of the contemporary homo sacer. Such a reading rejects the idea that the imagery of Salò represents a morbid or instrumental use of cruelty for pseudo-titillating purposes. For if the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 372nd Military Police Company who perpetrated and photographed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were inured to their activities by their consumption of pornography, they certainly did not turn to Salò for such inspiration.
 
Pasolini’s film in fact is remarkable for never letting the spectator identify with the victims, who do not masochistically enjoy their plight as in pornographic movies. Sexual acts in Salò are brutal assaults involving no foreplay and no undressing, aimed at the humiliation of naked, defenseless, and otherwise inert bodies, which look almost as though they are waiting for the gas chamber.⁵ In an interview included in The Criterion Collection’s DVD reissue of the film, the British filmmaker John Maybury notes that Salò actively undermines the viewer’s expectations of what is erotic.⁶ The victims for the most part are hard to recognize from one scene to the next, because of the director’s explicit aim of avoiding any sentimental or erotic identification by viewers with the prisoners, which would have rendered the film unendurable or suspect.⁷ The camera thus generally eschews closeups of the characters in favor of long and medium shots. Pasolini seems to discourage any perverse proximity to the torturers by casting them in the concluding and most lugubrious scenes as spectators of the final crimes.⁸ Neither sadism nor masochism are conduits to pleasure in Salò. Even the enjoyment of a more non-committal and passive form of pleasure such as voyeurism is stigmatised by the film’s final sequence, which shows the libertines looking at their victims being tortured through binoculars held in reverse to reduce the size of the image. One might say of Pasolini’s masterpiece what Stephen Eisenman says about the photos taken at Abu Ghraib, that “notwithstanding the superficial S/M scenarios there is no erotic delectation or titillation in the pictures from Abu Ghraib, nothing sexy about them” (34–35).
 
A Troubled Reception
 
Salò features few visual reminders of its ostensible period setting and even fewer references to the characteristic tenets of fascist ideology, including racist and totalitarian ambitions. The few reminders are rather subliminal.⁹ The most explicit iconographic references are to Nazism, such as the line-up of naked victims, which might remind the viewer of a choreography for concentration camps. Although Pasolini claimed that the project of adapting Sade began to have interest for him once he settled on the film’s historical scenario, he also stated decisively that he was trying to present fascism in visionary terms rather than as the logical or historical consequence of Sade.¹⁰ He insisted that he was using sex in Salò as a metaphor for power relationships, after having taken the opposite position a few years before in his cinematic adaptations of The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974). In these three films, which comprised his Trilogy of Life, he depicts sexuality as a space of transgression and a vital rejoinder to every act of domination.
 
Eventually, however, Pasolini abandoned this position, announcing in the essay, “Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life,” which he published in Il Corriere della Sera, that his intellectual duty was to abandon tenderness for extreme lucidity. In his late interviews and articles, we find a sustained critique of a phenomenon that he called the genocide of neofascism. Fascism, that is, provided in his eyes the clearest illustrations of what Foucault would have called “biopower” in action. At various points in his essays of the 1970s, Pasolini aired his view that the period in Italy in which he was writing had given rise to an even more calamitous incarnation of fascism than the original. He saw this crisis taking shape in phenomena such as the “strategy of tension” or campaign of bombings and assassinations by neofascist terrorist groups, the devastating effects of unbridled consumerism, and the advancing cultural homogenization (omologazione) that was annihilating the distinctive interests of the rural and urban poor to the advantage of an ascendant bourgeoisie. As he put it, “Consumerism consists in fact of a real and effective anthropological cataclysm: I live existentially through this cataclysm, which at least for now is pure degradation: I live it through my days, through the forms of my existence, and in my body” (Scritti 107).¹¹
 
At the time, he was fascinated by the rapid advance of cultural and political change in Italy following the so-called economic boom that peaked in the early 1960s, an “anthropological mutation (mutazione antropologica)”, as he called it, that encompassed among other things the spread of demographic and behavioral science. Pasolini thus may be regarded as a crucial predecessor to Agamben who, in a more philosophically formal manner, elaborates Pasolini’s anxiety regarding the biopolitical. Their sense of unease stands in contrast to the posture adopted by Foucault, whose writing typically strikes a note of enlightened detachment toward biopower. The French philosopher indeed treats the practices of biopolitics as facts of life, the harmful consequences of which such as racism may be addressed perfunctorily, in passim. After his crucial turn to the care of the self, Foucault abandoned altogether his exploration of the biopolitical. Was it because, as Agamben suggests, this line of inquiry would have led him inexorably to the reality of the death camps, the logical conclusion of a genealogical investigation of biopower? Salò may well be viewed as a work that imagines the camp as the nomos of modernity and visualizes the plight of the homo sacer whose biological life survives her legal status. The victims in Salò can be killed but not sacrificed, not even to the racist aspiration of fascism proper. Power in Salò appears in its most rigid manifestations, captured in its genealogical origin in the state of exception, yielding no productive outcome, and impervious to strategic resistance. In this sense, Salò is a profoundly anti-Foucauldian film.¹²
 
Pasolini proposed that our understanding of the body itself was being transformed by the consumerist drives of neocapitalism. These pressures, he argued in his late epistolary treatise “Gennariello,” comprise a coercive power far more effective than any religious or moral doctrine. In his second letter to Gennariello, the author instructs the boy not to fear feelings of awe inspired by the sacred and warns him against believing that the “Enlightenment” of “progressive intellectuals” is the standard of the future. Contra Foucault, Pasolini maintained that the thinking of the Enlightenment was not helpful in criticizing the false ideals of bourgeois tolerance and hedonistic self-interest. Well before the contributions of Derrida, or Wendy Brown, Pasolini was one of the first critical voices to speak out against the hypocritical ethos of tolerance promoted by the new consumerist regime.¹³ He suggested in several articles that the culture of the contemporary nation-state and, in particular, of Italy was increasingly finding expression in “the language of behavior, or physical language.” In his eyes, every aspect of our corporeal being from hairstyles to clothing and bodily posture was determined by the conformism and hedonistic consumption resulting from the triumph of the marketplace. He cautioned that the resulting physical language had assumed a decisive importance over and above that of verbal language, which in his judgment had become “conventional and sterilized” under the sway of the reigning technocracy.
 
Pasolini thus discerned in this biopolitical territory of the “somatic” the essential symptoms of the mutazione antropologica and omologazione that he believed had grown to threaten any hope for Italy’s political well-being. To grasp the significance of this claim, we might recall that in the 1960s he took the standpoint that only the body offered a basis of reality, because as he put it, “It was in such physical reality—his own body—that mankind was living its own culture” (qtd. in Cerami 82–83).¹⁴ Yet, as he understood only in retrospect, the bourgeoisie had succeeded in establishing a new civil order that functioned through the denaturalization of the body. For Pasolini, the populace as a whole thus had ceased to possess its own physical reality. Because they failed to register the cultural changes that delimited our bodily experience, the films comprising his Trilogy of Life exemplified a sort of pop eroticism that he now felt had helped to make the “false liberalization” of the 1960s more plausible in appearance. By contrast, he increasingly occupied himself in the 1970s with biopolitical questions such as abortion, demographic methods of analysis, and the transmutation of bodies through the unrelenting operations of consumerism, a menace that was conspicuously absent from Foucault’s analytic of power. In Pasolini’s view of this period, “The new system of production . . . is not only the production of goods but of human beings” (Letters 92).¹⁵ He assumed what might best be described as an anxious stance toward biopower during the last years of his life.
 
Salò and Abu Ghraib: Porno-Teo-Kolossal
 
The imagery of Salò may be seen to anticipate the imagery of Abu Ghraib in many respects. Pasolini’s camera confronts us with images of humans being forced to imitate animals, acts of sexual molestation, victims being awakened in the middle of the night, and, most importantly, the cynical stupidity of the signori and the central position of women in inciting the torture. Abu Ghraib sadly seems to have had its own narratrici in Megan Ambuhl, Sabrina Harman, and Lynndie England, whose roles in the abuse of prisoners were rehearsed repeatedly in the media coverage. That one purpose of Salò is to examine the spectacularized condition of modern-day torture—which is to say, the status of torture in contemporary culture as an object of visual enjoyment—is perhaps best illuminated by recalling that at one point Sergio Citti advised Pasolini to shoot the film almost entirely from the point of view of the torturers, who would be played by comic actors. In particular, Citti wanted to make the torturers “simpatici,” a proposition that Pasolini found ideologically repulsive (Pasolini, Cinema 2:3156). If the finished film departs from Citti’s thinking, it nevertheless grapples with questions he may have inspired, such as what part do jokes and other devices of amusement play in enabling acts of violence, and why might a comic reading of Sade be appropriate to present-day audiences? The writer and visual artist Laura Salvini argues that, whereas Citti aimed at a cynical reading of Sade, Pasolini wished to reveal the infantile core of Sadean philosophy by means of jokes, nonsense, and Dadaist methods that ultimately (and predictably) would result in a version of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (50). It seems to me instead that the reverse is true, that the film brings to the fore something all too well-known, if rarely acknowledged, in the contemporary conception of torture by focusing on the pseudo-comic modes of its dissemination, familiarization, and consumption.
 
The scandal of Abu Ghraib certainly makes the issues raised by Salò more relevant than ever. We currently face an abundance of evidence that the operations of actual, governmental power in our world more closely resemble the torments pictured in Pasolini’s Salò than Foucault’s anodyne vision of liberal democratic biopower and vitalism. At this moment, to view Salò with a critical eye means to look at what is most lamentably recognizable of ourselves in today’s headlines. It is impossible now to speak of our alienation or historical distance from the film’s images of naked, anonymous bodies, corporeal punishments and abuse, and the violation of religious taboos to taunt and humiliate. In the film, the libertines’ staging of a contest for the most beautiful ass among their captives uncannily presages the photos of Iraqi prisoners arranged in pyramids so that only their bare buttocks can be seen. The scene from the second section of Salò, “The Circle of Shit,” in which boys and girls are ordered to crawl across the floor on all fours and to eat food from the same bowls as dogs anticipates the many pictures of Iraqi men being forced to behave like animals and being threatened by dogs. Finally, the actor who plays Durcet in the film may even be said to bear an unsettling resemblance to George W. Bush, especially in his habit of responding to all events with a kind of leering, canned laughter, a trait that in Bush’s case was seized on by popular comedians such as Jon Stewart.
 
Stupidity, as Avital Ronell points out in her book of the same name, was looked upon in the philosophical tradition as an epistemological mistake and as a particular species of error (20). As in the case of Hölderlin’s appreciation of Rousseau, Ronell reminds us, stupidity has been taken at times to imply a poetic disposition due to its association with characteristics such as innocence or simplicity (8). From the twentieth century onward, however, it has become increasingly difficult to deny that stupidity also has been the accomplice of violence, cruelty, and totalitarianism. A range of thinkers from Arendt to Musil argue that totalitarianism requires the subordination of intellect to doctrine, thus reinterpreting an attribute that Pope John Paul already had ascribed to the reverential aspect of stupidity, namely the submissive obedience to the father (9). Pasolini’s critical and artistic productions contribute in decisive ways to the work of mapping the political, ethical, and cultural contours of contemporary stupidity. Salò specifically undertakes to scrutinize the cynical dimensions of stupidity and to make visible the stupidity of “jouissance.” In his late essays and his unfinished novel Petrolio, Pasolini acutely traces the connection between hedonism, the capitalist ideology of tolerance, and idiotic enjoyment. The sections on the “passegiate del Merda” in Petrolio are in this sense exemplary. Not surprisingly, an important element of the anthropological mutation against which Pasolini warns his audience is the disposition to obey and conform to consumerism’s categorical imperative to enjoy. In Salò, he explores the darkest, most repugnant aspects of enjoyment as they manifest themselves in the “state of exception.”
 
Adriana Cavarero has coined the term “horrorism,” in a book that takes this neologism as its title, to designate the extreme forms of violence that we are forced to reckon with in contemporary culture—from suicide bombings to Abu Ghraib—as seen from the point of view not of the warrior, but rather of the vulnerable and powerless victim. In a chapter entitled “Female Torturers Grinning at the Camera,” Cavarero revisits Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to dispute his sweeping conclusion that the spectacularization of violence in the process of punishment disappears at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ultimately to be replaced by the effort to keep at bay barbarism and torture. That the tortures of Abu Ghraib were photographed, Cavarero convincingly argues, is not an accident and by no means surprising.¹⁶ Yet however strong we might find the visual correspondences between Pasolini’s film and the photos from Abu Ghraib, what is really most important in discussing both the work of cinematic illusion and the documents of historical reality is the realization that what we encounter in both cases is finally an eliciting not of pleasure, but rather of stupid enjoyment. Discussing the Abu Ghraib photos, Cavarero observes:

Even if sadomasochistic culture plays a part, sexual pleasure is perhaps an inappropriate term here. The photos do not convey the idea of carnal ecstasy (although there is arousal) but rather that of an obtuse and grotesque form of diversion, witless and trivial. What stands out in them is a spectral caricature of torture reduced to the level of filthy farce.

(Horrorism 110–11)¹⁷

I believe the same ethos, if we may call it by this name, is present in Salò, and it is no small achievement on the part of Pasolini to inject this farcical dimension into the narrative where there is none in Sade.¹⁸

In Salò, the least Sadean and least sophisticated character in the execution of his rituals also turns out ultimately to be the most interesting and contemporary for us as viewers, namely Durcet. Whereas the archbishop, the duke, and the magistrate maintain their air of snobbery and dignified heavy-handedness as they go about the performance of their tasks and punishments, Durcet presents himself as an anarchic, farcical torturer. For example, he does not himself put up any resistance to being sodomized in public, he lobbies actively for his favorite choice in the contest for the most beautiful derrière, and he plays with panache the female role in a mock marriage ceremony to one of the other signori. Yet the most consistent and relevant trait of Durcet is the stupidity of his humor, which is made manifest repeatedly throughout the film. When somebody dies in the film—which for all the atrocities that are shown on camera takes place only in the final few minutes of Salò—Durcet lamely attempts to diffuse the tension by reciting inane jokes.
 
Blangis, the duke, functions as the ideological fulcrum of the narrative. He not only defines for the other characters the stakes and rules of the game, but also reserves for himself the privilege of articulating the nature and identity of the group. For example, in the Circle of Manias, he announces: “We the Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally once that we are masters of the state. In fact, the only true anarchy is that of power.”¹⁹ By contrast, it is left to Durcet to provide the “laugh track” of the film through his continual, neurotic self-amusement. When a boy tries to flee and is shot while the libertines are bringing the captives to the villa in the Antinferno sequence, Durcet comments with the following joke:

In the persona of Durcet, Pasolini endows Sade with a pseudo-comic chorus, one in which he stigmatizes the association of stupidity and cruelty. Durcet continues his infantile ride through the film by indulging himself with bouts of exhibitionism, as when he asks a man who is sodomizing a girl to sodomize him instead (Cinema 2: 2040).

 
The scene shows him taking a grotesque merriment in his predicament, although it is impossible to speak of the episode in terms of pleasure or enjoyment. Although the incident might look at first sight like one of the crudest moments in Salò, the “event” of Durcet’s sodomizing takes place without any trace of drama because of his cheerful, if stupid, attitude. This undramatic occurrence is quickly followed by the recitation of another of Durcet’s “numerical” jokes, after everybody realizes that one of the girl prisoners has committed suicide. Durcet’s jokes demonstrate first of all his cynical indifference to all events. In the passage of dialogue cited above, this attitude is evident in the perfunctoriness with which he subtracts the murder victim from his tally of the boy prisoners and then offers a feebleminded pun based on the sound of the word “otto.” Durcet’s jokes manage somehow to produce an easy consensus. In fact, it is only after his half-baked attempts at humor that a stage direction using the word “all (tutti)” as a means of encompassing the community of the guards and torturers (if not the victims) achieves a paradoxical validity. The jokes themselves are neither ironic, nor revelatory, nor witty in the least. Their autistic self-referentiality and reliance on elementary wordplay and numbers betray a mechanical and grotesque simplemindedness. According to both Freud and Lacan, we should remember, jokes rely on a momentary bypassing of the symbolic order but not on its suppression. In a real joke, an unconscious thought is expressed while being censored at the same time (hence the humor, the deformation, the punning energy, etc.).
 
In Salò, the “symbolic,” communicative quality of Durcet’s jokes presumes a shared state of stupid “jouissance,” as no witty detour through the domain of the symbolic is available. His “comic” performances thus establish a form of cynical stupidity as the totalitarian ethos of Salò. Indeed, the last two jokes that Durcet utters in the film are more openly aggressive, if not funnier. Thus, in the Circle of Shit, he addresses one of his victims as follows:

And of all the signori, it is to Durcet that Pasolini gives the final words of the film, of course in the form of yet another joke. As his friends are torturing and killing their victims in the courtyard, Durcet, looking on, asks one of the guards:

 

The desultory punch line is all the more jarring since the political premise of the joke, including the reference to Bolshevism, seemed to promise a more substantive effort. Yet we can hardly expect Durcet, after all, to express any passion about his ostensible creed of Fascism or any visceral antipathy to Communism. He is a cynic whose “enlightened false consciousness” derives no pleasure from subversion or satire, to use Sloterdijk’s definition in his Critique of Cynical Reason.

 
We may thus take Durcet as the progenitor of the sensibility responsible for Abu Ghraib at the highest levels of command, but also as the embodiment of their “phenomenological” manifestation in the actions of Charles Grainer, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, and their colleagues who were captured striking their grotesque poses for the camera. Like Durcet, such individuals reveal their banality in the indulging of what Cavarero aptly calls “the stupidity of a criminal act committed in the excitement of farce” (Horrorism 112; Orrorismo 150). In this connection, we might reflect on the chilling interview with Sabrina Harman in Rory Kennedy’s documentary, The Ghosts of Abu-Ghraib. What is of particular interest is the matter-of-fact tone and faux-innocent manner with which Harman explains her involvement in prisoner abuse in reply to Kennedy’s questions. Harman explains her big smile in the photos taken at Abu Ghraib by insisting that she always smiles for the camera, and explains that the photos exist because like many other people she is in the habit of taking pictures of everything. Although the film contains other disturbing “explanations” of Abu Ghraib from many different sources, Harmon’s is one of the worst in virtue of the cynical stupidity of her remarks. In this sense, the truth of Salò might be glimpsed most clearly in Harmon’s self-justification and in Cavarero’s observation that Abu Ghraib has presented horror “in the imbecile and idiotic form of the leer” (Horrorism 115; Orrorismo 154).
 
For Pasolini, the parodic debasement of culture that he set out to expose in Salò provides a clear symptom of how dependent the body of neocapitalism had become on the circulation of cynicism through its veins. What was at stake in this process of debasement becomes more evident if we pay attention to one of the subtler changes that was taking place on what Pasolini would have called the “somatic” level in Italy. Throughout his career, he was particularly alert to the semiotics or poetics of smiles, perhaps secretly agreeing with Dante’s tenet in the Convivio that such expressions are like colors behind the glass of the soul.²³ Consequently, we may find it pertinent that the libertines in Salò wear perpetual “sneers” on their faces, conveying reflexive idiocy in the president’s case, perplexed lasciviousness in the archbishop’s, and false bonhomie in the duke’s.
 
During the same period that he was involved in shooting Salò, Pasolini noted a transformation taking place in facial expressions among children in Italy: “They do not know how to smile or laugh: they can only grin or grimace” (Letters 14).²⁴ Among the most painful consequences of the mutazione antropologica and omologazione of Italian culture resulting from the new order of power, in his estimation, were the erasure of regional dialects from the Italian language and the disappearance of “the old way of smiling.”²⁵ The topic of smiling is of more than peripheral importance to understand Pasolini’s late style insofar as in his visual phenomenology, the spontaneity and sympathetic expressiveness of the smile offered a possibility of relief from the detachment and repressive conformity of bourgeois laughter. The repertoire of bodily and facial responses to the cruelty and suffering that occupy our attention in Salò, however, clearly raises the prospect of an epoch in which cynical laughter has triumphed, in which every smile is converted into a frozen mask of pain.
 
Pasolini Against Foucault
 
Foucault first encountered Pasolini’s filmmaking in the documentary Love Meetings (1964), which explores Italian sexual mores through interviews with men and women of various classes and regional origins. At the time, the French philosopher looked approvingly on the Italian director’s investigation of sexual politics for exposing how the rhetoric of “tolerance” suppresses emotional and cultural differences in order to uphold the dominant social regime (Foucault, Aesthetics 229–231). On viewing Salò, however, Foucault took Pasolini to task unsparingly, assailing what he regarded as the filmmaker’s shallow decision to treat sadism as a phenomenological manifestation of fascism. Scrutinizing Salò through the lens of Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), Foucault charged Pasolini in “Sade, sergeant du sexe” with contributing to an aestheticized, morbid association of sadism with fascism that seemed to him a specious fad of the moment (Aesthetics 223–227). Foucault condemned Salò for perpetuating an exploitative image of sadism that encouraged a hierarchical, punitive idea of sexuality. Sadomasochism instead represented for him an ironic, self-conscious form of life with the potential to deconstruct the bodily regimes of pleasure enforced by less playful modalities.
 
Pasolini shares with Foucault a fundamental emphasis on what the French thinker called “biopower.” Yet Foucault and Pasolini clearly diverge on where the ascendancy of the biopolitical may lead. Whereas biopower for Foucault entails the possibility of the productive rearticulation of social relations, admittedly at the risk of enabling sexist and racist disciplinary practices, for Pasolini it instead raises the prospect of irresistible authoritarian oppression. In his late work, Foucault often disputes the idea that power might be the metaphorical referent of sex or, in other words, the secret underlying our ethical and political life (Dits 1554–1565). His idealization of sadomasochism serves to expand contemporary notions of sexuality, which to a significant degree still customarily take as their starting point the Freudian teleology of genitality, into the territory of de-genitalized pleasure.²⁶ In so doing, Foucault at the same time proposes through his new cartography of sexuality the genealogy of a new subject. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, he writes: “To conceive the category of the sexual in terms of the law, death, blood and sovereignty—whatever the references to Sade and Bataille, and however one might gauge their ‘subversive’ influence—is in the last analysis a historical retroversion” (Reader 271–272). Considering the implications of this statement for Pasolini’s reinterpretation of Sade, we might ask whether or not we should consider Salò another and perhaps more acute symptom of the “historical retroversion” that Foucault attributes to Sade and Bataille and that he disdains for reflecting a morbid understanding of sexuality in terms of “law, death, blood and sovereignty.”
 
At first glance, the film might appear to rework the themes of sovereignty and blood that characterize Bataille’s view of sex and, in Foucault’s eyes, reveal its cultural obsolescence. A more nuanced analysis, however, might take Salò to be concerned more with the problematic persistence of sovereignty in the supposedly benign time of biopolitical, administrative power than with a triumphal erotics of the death instinct. In this sense, it is important to distinguish between Pasolini’s and Bataille’s projects. Whereas Pasolini’s film retains its exemplary force in the era of Abu Ghraib, Bataille’s writing does not. Giorgio Agamben helps to explain the reason for this difference when he identifies the political and critical limit of Bataille’s thought: “To have mistaken such a naked life, separate from its form, in its abjection, for a superior principle—sovereignty or the sacred—is the limit of Bataille’s thought, which makes it useless to us” (Means 7). Agamben also comments in Homo Sacer that while Bataille rightly recognizes bare life as a radical form of experience, he fails to grasp its political significance and mistakenly locates it in an ill-defined domain of the sacred, due to its association with the phenomenon of sacrifice (112).²⁷ By contrast, Pasolini makes a deliberate effort to emphasize moral and political questions in depicting the bare life of the disempowered body. As we have noted already, he furthermore studiously avoids promising the viewer an enjoyable loss of identity in Salò à la Bataille.²⁸ A sovereign use of negativity is not what informs Pasolini’s work as it does Bataille’s.²⁹
 
In the “Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life,” Pasolini observes that the ideal of sexual liberation reveals itself as an illusion under the conditions imposed by consumer culture:

Now all that has been turned upside down. First: the progressive struggle for democratization of expression and for sexual liberation has been brutally superseded and cancelled out by the decision of consumerist power to grant a tolerance as vast as it is false. Second: even the “reality” of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, enslaved by consumerist power—indeed such violence to human bodies has become the most macroscopic fact of the new human epoch.

(Letters 49–50)³⁰

What is apparent to Pasolini is that the “anthropological mutation” of unrestrained consumption is not “reversible” and leads irrevocably to an “adaptation to degradation” (Letters 50–51).³¹ Unlike Foucault, who glibly defines power in terms of its potential for strategic reversibility or retournement tactique (Histoire 208), Pasolini sees little possibility of counteracting this process of cultural brutalization.³² In this sense, Pasolini’s pessimism differs markedly from both Bataille’s self-indulgent romanticism and Foucault’s pragmatic optimism.

 
If we see Foucault as tending to argue for a linear, chronological progression from sovereignty to governmentality and then to biopower, a progression that ultimately entails the dissolution of sovereignty, then we may conclude that Salò represents a radically different view of history.³³_Salò confronts us with the image of contemporary culture as a continuum in which power operates without restraint, suggesting that even in an epoch when it appears that governmentality has superseded sovereignty, sovereign force has the last word. Viewing Salò in the wake of Abu Ghraib makes evident Pasolini’s prescience in insisting that uninhibited power quickly results in a totalitarian universe of suffering, especially at a historical moment when power gives the appearance of having been domesticated or “urbanized.” The film persistently raises a troubling question: has anything in fact been gained when civil authority renounces the prerogative of sovereignty “to make die and let live,” as Foucault formulated it, and instead embraces the imperative of biopower “to make live and let die”—that is, to sustain itself through the management of the biological life of the population? Whereas for Foucault, Sade represents the genealogical origin of the diversification of power into the modalities of the sovereign and the biological, for Pasolini, the French libertine personifies their ultimate point of convergence.
 
In a discussion of biopolitics in the last chapter of the first volume of History of Sexuality, Foucault characterizes the strategic importance of Sade as marking the transition from a symbolic of blood to one of sexuality:

Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regulations. Sade and the first eugenists were contemporary with this transition from “sanguinity” to “sexuality.” . . . Sade carried the exhaustive analysis of sex over into the mechanisms of the old power of sovereignty and endowed it with the ancient but fully maintained prestige of blood; the latter flowed through the whole dimension of pleasure. . . . In Sade, sex is without any norm or intrinsic rule that might be formulated from its own nature; but it is subject to the unrestricted law of a power which itself knows no other law but its own.

(Reader 269–70)

Foucault speaks of sex as submitted in Sade to a “naked sovereignty” and to the “unlimited right of all powerful monstrosity” (270). This idea of sex as being subject to a “naked sovereignty” that is totalizing and inescapable in its claim on the subject is exactly what Pasolini is interested in as a reader of Sade, it seems to me. Yet it is important to observe that the logic of Salò advances from sex to blood, reversing the genealogy that, according to Foucault, Sade inaugurates. Pasolini divides the film into a sequence of three “circles” or episodes, the last of which, titled “The Circle of Blood,” follows in the narrative after the circles of mania and of shit. The action of the film thus unfolds according to a scheme that is Pasolini’s own idea and that abandons the original sectioning of Sade’s treatise into four untitled parties. As part of its project to deconstruct the illusory notion that sovereignty gives way to governmentality under the auspices of the biopolitical, Salò restores blood—not sex, not even monstrous sex—to the position of ultimate symbolic importance. Instead of providing the basis of a new language-game of erotic play, sadomasochism in Pasolini’s eyes exposes its archaic condition as an unmediated, hierarchical exercise of power. Whereas Foucault hoped that the rituals of S/M might reveal avenues for the conversion of power into sexual pleasure, Pasolini soberingly reminds us that, in the domain of our social and political institutions, the other way around is the historical reality.³⁴

 
From Foucault’s disparaging comments about the film in a 1975 interview, we might surmise at first glance that his chief objection to Salò was, in fact, that it suggested to him a mistaken historical association of sadism with fascism:

Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madman of the eighteenth century but by the most sinister, boring, and disgusting petit-bourgeois imaginable. . . . The problem raised is why we imagine today to have access to certain erotic phantasms through Nazism. . . . Is it our incapacity to live out this great enchantment of the disorganized body that we project onto a meticulous, disciplinary, anatomical sadism? Is the only vocabulary that we possess for transcribing the grand pleasure of the body in explosion this sad fable of a recent political apocalypse?

(Aesthetics 226)³⁵

Foucault appears to hold that “the grand pleasure” promised by the present-day culture of S/M is categorically different from either the “petit-bourgeois” phenomenon of Nazism or Sade’s vision of sovereign sexual punishment.

 
Pasolini and Agamben on Bare Life
 
In its consideration of the managerial and institutional technologies of control, Foucault’s analysis of power might appear at first glance to be more sophisticated than Pasolini’s critique of consumer society.³⁶ As I have been arguing, however, the Italian filmmaker discerned, no less than the French critic did, that contemporary forms of life had come under the dominion of a new phenomenology of biopower, although the two thinkers reached very different conclusions about what this development signified. In widely-read critical essays such as “Discourse on Hair,” “Study of the Anthropological Revolution in Italy,” and “Article of the Fireflies,” which Pasolini published mostly in newspapers such as Il Tempo and Il Corriere della Sera at the end of his career, he clearly set out to examine the increasingly ruthless governmental and commercial methods of control over the life of the general population in Italian society.³⁷
 
His perception of an “anthropological mutation” or “cultural genocide” that could be attributed to the overwhelming commodification of social relations reflected his position that the workings of the biopolitical domain represent unmistakably “totalitarian” forms of power: “Italian culture has changed in its forms of life, in its existential texture, in a concrete way. . . . Whoever has manipulated and radically (anthropologically) changed the large masses of Italian peasants and workers is a new power which I find difficult to define: but I am certain that it is the most violent and totalitarian that has ever been” (Scritti 57–58).³⁸ Pasolini highlights the adverb “anthropologically” in this sentence by putting it in a parenthesis, thus giving special emphasis to the occurrence of change at the most basic level of human life and suggesting a certain incredulity at the pervasiveness of the process. The parenthesis seems to emblematize Pasolini’s dread of a new, “exceptional” power.
 
More particularly, Salò brings to light the vertiginousness of the state of exception— that is, the way it functions as a political mise en abîme—insofar as the film presents the Republic of Salò as a unique political exception within the larger, historically monstrous exception of Fascism itself. As the duc de Blangis, the ideological master of ceremonies, announces to his victims in the film’s prelude, the section titled Antinferno: “You are outside the boundaries of any legal order, nobody on earth knows you are here. As far as the world is concerned, you are already dead. . . . And here are the laws that will rule your life inside this place” (Cinema 2: 2036).³⁹ By putting these words in the mouth of the duke, the film locates the origin of lawless regulative force over the life of the subject in the state of exception. At the same time, Salò is keen to establish a libidinal profile for this extra-legal form of power. In his evident distance from Bataille’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power, as I have remarked earlier, Pasolini comes close to presaging many of Agamben’s positions. Pasolini’s thought may be aligned with that of Agamben in suggesting not only that there is no real historical relief from sovereignty, but that in fact contemporary conditions have exacerbated the oppressiveness with which sovereignty imposes itself on the subject by declaring a state of exception.⁴⁰ Agamben differs from Foucault in regarding the inclusion of bare life in the political realm as the original mission of sovereign power and not as a modern phenomenon. For Agamben, what characterizes the current political order is not its mere “inclusion” of bare life but rather the fact that the political realm comes to coincide entirely with the realm of bare life (Homo Sacer 9). It is in this spirit that Pasolini’s Salò may be said to illustrate Agamben’s radical and, as some critics would say, hopeless position. All the victims in Salò are exemplary cases of the “sacred” man or woman who is situated for Agamben “at the intersection of a capacity to be killed and yet not sacrificed, outside both human and divine law” (73). In the film, the Republic of Salò represents the experience of the concentration camp precisely in its aspect as the “nomos of the modern” (166).
 
By reading the film in this manner, I do not wish to suggest that Pasolini did not elsewhere take an interest in sadism or masochism. If we as readers seek a demonstration of his talent for the mise en scène of masochistic fantasy, however, we should turn to his unfinished epic novel Petrolio, rather than to Salò. Yet even in Petrolio, he problematizes the relationship between power and sexuality in a way that makes it impossible to give the last word naively to eros. Salò anticipates Agamben’s concept of bare life in the sense of depicting how exposure to absolute power reduces life to the merely biological dimensions of existence. The point might be rephrased by saying that Pasolini’s warnings against the cultural genocide of consumerism bespeak his awareness of the advancing transformation of bios into zoe, the meaningless substratum of capitalist triumph. In his early career, the director seemed to maintain some hope of redemptive cultural possibilities for a homo sacer of Italian society such as the titular character of his first film, Accattone (1961). In keeping with this hope, he adopted what he called a “sacred technique” of cinematography that suggested a quasi-religious reverence toward his subject matter by reinterpreting specific techniques of the Italian pictorial tradition—for example, only filming his characters frontally and never showing them entering or exiting a scene. Yet he quickly grew sceptical of the potential for social and cultural repair. Reflecting on his directorial debut near the end of his life, he wrote, “Accattone and his friends went silently toward deportation and the final solution, perhaps even laughing at their warder. But what about us, the bourgeois witnesses?” (Letters 104).⁴¹ By the time of Salò, Pasolini had no illusions about any potential salvation for the homines sacres of contemporary history.⁴²
 
To gauge just how disenchanted he had become, we ought to consider his impatience with Elsa Morante’s bestselling novel History (1974), which was published just a year before the initial release of Salò. History relates the travails of a schoolteacher named Ida as she struggles, during the events of World War II, to protect and to provide for her son Useppe, the child of Ida’s rape by a German soldier. In a review published in Il Tempo, July 26, 1974, Pasolini dismissed Morante’s sentimental triumphalism, which he suggested gave a false view of life: “ . . . . Morante does not ‘represent’ life, but in fact celebrates it” (Descrizione 464). At the end of another essay on the novel published on August 2, 1974, Pasolini took Morante to task for propounding an ideologically and philosophically simplistic opposition between history and life, pointedly asking, “How can one separate history as Power from the History of those who are subjected to the violence of that power?” (Descrizione 472). He attributed to the novelist a particularly naïve version of Spinozist vitalism, a stance that he felt led her unrealistically to posit life as an antidote to history. On this ground, we might agree with Agamben’s proposal in Profanazioni that Pasolini’s Salò ought to be viewed as a serious parody of Morante’s La storia.⁴³
 
The Aesthetic State of Exception
 
There is a long tradition within Western art, as Stephen Eisenman reminds us, devoted to the aesthetics of suffering. Examples of this lineage, such as the famous, antique sculpture of Laöcoon and his sons, may be defined by their achievement of what Aby Warburg called the “pathos formula” of perfect coincidence between archetypal form and emotional content. According to Eisenman, the genealogy evolves from the ideal of the beautiful death enshrined in classical Greek and Roman culture through the art of the Renaissance and the Grand Style, when a certain reverence for sacred and erotic violence prevailed in the modern imagination, and extends to the “entente between torturer and victim” now all-too familiar from photographic imagery and other mass media. Notable objections to the dominance of this paradigm include Hogarth’s satirical repudiation of the classical tradition as well as the anti-war paintings of artists such as Goya and Picasso (in the significant instance of Guernica) (60–91). Notwithstanding such protests, Eisenman concludes that imperialism, fascism, and mass culture have made the oppressive influence of the “pathos formula” inescapable (92). Pasolini’s Salò ought to be seen as one of the most powerful challenges to the “pathos formula” in contemporary culture, as its peculiar brand of pathos or excessive expressiveness cannot be passively absorbed and consumed. The film poses hard critical and political questions to the viewer and drives home its argument with explosive verve and theatricality. More than any cruel or pornographic subject matter, it seems to me, this challenge has been the source of the film’s civic rejection and notoriety.
 
Salò indeed deserves to be recognized as a serious parody, as Agamben has suggested, and not only of Elsa Morante’s pedestrian achievement in History. The film is constructed as a parodic mise en abîme of references to literary and cinematic masterpieces that comprehends not only Sade’s Sodome, but also Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s poem in fact provides Salò with its Antinferno as well as its circles of mania, shit, and blood, thus establishing the concentric topography of the narrative. The parataxis and framing devices of storytelling that are manifest in the ostensible, Sadean ur-text thus have less influence as structuring principles than the gravitational impetus of the film toward the abyss of Dante. From a cinematic perspective, the opening sequence of Salò strikes a note of decided irreverence toward the historical and narrative premises of Neorealism when, during the initial round-up of prisoners for the enjoyment of the four signori who are the film’s main characters, we see a mother trying to give a scarf to her son, Claudio, in mock homage to Sora Pina’s similar gesture in Rome, Open City. Repeatedly, the film ridicules bourgeois taste, manners, and judgment, particularly with respect to literary matters. For example, the signori invoke Proust without showing the slightest understanding of the French novelist’s complex inquiry into time and memory. The four libertines pretentiously reappropriate Proust’s notion of “jeune filles en fleur” (young girls in bloom) as the label for their female victims because one of them is named Albertine. The grotesque self-validation involved in this gesture gives the impression of an especially debased form of bourgeois egoism and calls into question any possibility of aesthetic recuperation. In the Circle of Shit, the film even stages a sustained travestying of democratic process when the signori call for a vote to determine the most beautiful ass among the naked bottoms of their victims. Finally, the film may be interpreted as a caricature of that very association of fascism and sadism of which it stands accused.
 
Pasolini labors to avoid aestheticizing cruelty in Salò by methodically satirizing the aesthetic snobbery of the signori, depicting them as poseurs who surround themselves with works of avant-garde art, quote Baudelaire and Proust, and sprinkle their conversation with French as if in a burlesque of fin de siècle, bourgeois domesticity. Dante Ferretti’s extravagant set design for Salò furnishes in art deco style the palatial villa where the film’s events unfold and makes a prominent display of the abstract paintings of Fernand Léger. The furniture maintains for the most part a geometrical purity of line yet occasionally displays hints of ornament, as if to embody an art besieged by mass production, a last gasp of original expression in the age of technology (cf. Benjamin on the Jugendstil in the Arcades Project). Leger’s paintings further elaborate this drama of the human haunted by the mechanical, at the same time that they stage a disorienting struggle between depth and surface. The suffocating atmosphere of the villa is enhanced by Pasolini’s and Ferretti’s deliberate choices, as not only the innocent victims of the signori, but also language, art, and thought come under attack in a continuous, totalizing, and oppressive domain that encapsulates the operations of neocapitalism and well might be called “saturated life.”
 
For this reason, we may discount Leo Bersani’s and Ulysse Dutoit’s assertion that aesthetics in Salò is used to achieve a Verfremdungseffekt or distancing of the viewer, as a way of keeping violence at bay (29). Indeed, Ferretti may be said to have created one of the most magisterially disturbing sets in film history, although it should be noted that he was helped in the end result by the equally talented costume designer Danilo Donati. Far from distracting the viewer from the agonies of the libertines’ victims, the aesthetic surface of the film reflects the violence without beautifying or otherwise mystifying it, which may be one of Pasolini’s greatest achievements.
 
Not accidentally, mirrors are present in almost every shot of Salò. In some crucial sequences, two large mirrors stand opposite each other, creating a visual mise en abîme of the torture scene that serves to intensify the viewer’s horror. Mounted in wrought-iron frames whose rectilinear ornamental patterns consort with the general art deco look of the villa, the mirrors promise a containment of the image that they ultimately fail to deliver. The Bauhaus furniture, the iron-bound mirrors, the wall-mounted triangular lamps faltering ambivalently between mechanical lines and more organic, wave-like shapes – all these details are the symptoms of an art under the malign spell of technology, as the selection of abstract paintings by Leger and by what appear to be an assortment of Futurists would appear to confirm. The overall aesthetic of the villa flirts with some vestigial concept of decoration, as in the case of the wall lamps that surreptitiously hint at a naturalistic principle of roundness. The large scale of the figures on display in the paintings by Leger suggests an allegory of the final, grotesque throes of figurative pictorialism, as they float like anxious, dehumanized mannequins in the void. The other paintings, including what looks like an example of the Fascist painter Mario Sironi’s work, generally uphold a pseudo-Futurist strain of abstraction that rapidly comes to look banal in its context.
 
As I already have noted, Pasolini tried in his earlier films to sacralize the image through techniques such as his insisting in Accattone on frontal views of the characters in order to evoke Masaccio’s compositions, alluding in Mamma Roma to Mantegna’s painting of Christ’s deposition, and echoing Fiorentino’s and Pontormo’s works in the tableaux vivants of La ricotta. Pasolini’s loyalty to the teachings of the art historian Roberto Longhi, to whose courses on art history at the University of Bologna he credited his inspiration as a visual artist, is well documented. Given the seriousness of his engagement with questions of art history and criticism, we should never believe that the references in his films to paintings or to the pictorial tradition were in any sense casual. It is thus noteworthy that Pasolini made almost no reference to modern paintings in his fims prior to Salò. The overwhelming presence in Salò of modernist, avant-garde, abstract painting thus represents a break with the visual signature of his earlier films and an unmistakeable sign that the project of sacralità tecnica is finished. Admittedly, Ferretti and Pasolini perversely chose the kind of paintings banned by Fascism to decorate the villa. Yet no apparent redeeming quality seems to be derived from this decision. The incessant exchange of fetishized, high-cultural references between the libertines, including citations of Baudelaire, Proust, Nietzsche, and Huysmann, indicates how vulnerable art and philosophy have become to commodification in the milieu of bourgeois consumerism as it is brought to light by Salò. In the “Circle of Manias” that constitutes the first segment of the film, Curval–one of the four signori–attributes to Baudelaire the following maxim: “Without the letting of blood, there is no forgiveness.” However, one of his companions in cruelty is quick to reply that in fact the quote comes from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. This claim prompts Curval in turn to propose that the quote finally derives neither from Baudelaire nor from Nietzsche, as it is simply from Dada. This entire game of attribution is made all the more farcical by Blangis, who starts singing a jingle from an Italian television advertisement that contains the nonsense syllables “da-da” in the song’s refrain (Cinema 2: 2043).
 
What emerges from this derisive portrait of the half-witted claims to cultural authority advanced by the signori is a decadent genealogy of cruelty that progresses seamlessly from Baudelaire to Dada and thence to consumerism. That Pasolini privileges the genealogy’s most recent efflorescence in consumer culture over its supposed origins in modernism or the avant-garde may be deduced from the fact that he revealingly assigns the task of singing the jingle to Blangis, the group’s ideological spokesman. In one quick passage of dialogue, Pasolini sums up the powerlessness of art, especially avant-garde art, to defy the numbing automatism of consumer society.⁴⁴ If Salò is about the unmooring of political and libidinal power as the result of a state of exception that has become the norm, then, the film also succeeds in establishing a symmetrical state of exception in the field of aesthetics. Simply to try to represent Sade on screen was to defy more than the simple conventions of polite decorum; Salò has often been considered a film that reaches the limits of the visible.⁴⁵
 
From Barthes to Foucault, the intellectual verdict of viewers at the time of the film’s release seemed unanimous. To undertake to adapt Sade’s work for the cinematic medium was a misguided project, inherently doomed to failure. “I believe that there is nothing more allergic to the cinema than the work of Sade,” said Foucault in 1975 (Aesthetics 223). Barthes similarly chastised Pasolini for having made fascism unreal and Sade “real.” ⁴⁶ In yet another sense, however, the idea of a subject that is intrinsically inappropriate for representation in the “aesthetic regime” is a contradiction in terms, as Jacques Rancière points out, because “this principled identity of the appropriate and the inappropriate is the very stamp of the aesthetic regime in art” (126). The incongruity of material and representation in Salò only fulfils one of the tenets of modern aesthetics, albeit while pushing it to its paradoxical logical extreme.
 
Yet we might have reason to feel that, toward the end of his career, Pasolini was having a hard time accepting “the aesthetic regime” in art. His late essays are anti-cynical tracts, which represent his efforts, as Carla Benedetti has suggested, to produce an impure, “inappropriate” art and poetry that might not end up in the terrain of “principled identity” discussed by Rancière, but rather in a much more disturbing territory (13–17). In his last collection of poems, Trasumanar e organizzar (1971), Pasolini’s anti-lyrical efforts result in a strangely pragmatic poetry that represents the exact antithesis of the first verses he ever published, his elegiac poems in Friulan dialect. We might surmise from the evidence of these late artistic productions that he viewed the “principled identity of the appropriate and inappropriate” to be a cynical destiny for art, regarding it as a symptom of the enlightened false consciousness that characterizes cynical reason, to borrow Sloterdijk’s terms. Although for a while he may have believed that his own brand of “impurity” would have immunized his art against the kind of moral and aesthetic game-playing of the neo-avant-garde, Salò clearly marks the point of ideological non-return.
 
The film, in other words, represents a turning point at which Pasolini finds his late style, making clear in the process that he no longer believes in the ability of art to heal the wounds of history and in fact aligning modernist aesthetics with cynicism, violence, and power. Drawing on the foundation of Sade’s Les 120 jours de Sodome, the film dares to provide images for a universe that, according to critics such as Barthes, should have been reserved uniquely for the operations of writing and the imagination. We should bear in mind, however, that Sade, who wrote his masterpiece while imprisoned in the Bastille, expressly regarded his own subject matter as having resulted in a literary state of exception: “It is now, friendly reader, that you must prepare your heart and mind for the most impure story that has ever been told since the world began, a similar book not existing either amongst the ancients or the moderns” (qtd. in Bataille 117). In this sense, Pasolini’s Salò might appear to extend the original, linguistic state of exception of Sade’s book into the domain of the visual. In so doing, the film elaborates an all too prophetic vision of what the contemporary reign of biopower has become, like an image of cruelty we can neither turn away from nor disavow.