Salò and the School of Abuse

Ramsey McGlazer (bio)
University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

Repeatedly, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), has been read as prophesying later political realities. This essay instead analyzes Salò‘s insistent backwardness: its interest in dated rituals, fascist politics, “regressive” sexual practices, and outmoded pedagogical forms. By these backward means, the essay argues, Salò schools its spectators in what Ernesto De Martino calls the salience of the “bad past that returns.” Such a return structures the film, which thus refuses the progressive imperative to disavow or forget the fascist past. Rather, for Pasolini reenacting this past becomes an alternative to fascism’s remaining “real.”

Salò Our Contemporary

There are two stories that are often told about the very end of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s career. According to the first, he went too far. According to the second, with Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom] (1975), he predicted the future that is our present. In this essay, I will be telling a different story, one about what I will call Pasolini’s pedagogy and its relation to the past. This will also be an effort to make sense of the filmmaker’s claim that Salò was “conceived as a rite” (Bachmann 42). For, as I will show, the kinds of teaching that organize Salò are associated with ritual and repetition rather than with advancement and innovation. They are pointedly backward, characterized by coercion, constraint, and corporal punishment rather than with their progressive alternatives. By such outmoded educational means—by administering a version of the instruction that it thematizes—Salò invites resistance, or sets resistance to work, as it seeks to redress a present marked by disavowal. But before beginning this account of the film, I will distill those other two stories to offer a sense of the critical conversation to which my reading responds, and in which it participates.

The first story is pathologizing, and although it doesn’t prevail the way it used to, versions of it still persist. Those who tell this critical story argue that Pasolini went too far, not only because he got himself killed the same year Salò was released, but also because he showed what shouldn’t be shown.¹ He made us see—or tried to make us see—what we didn’t want to see. He lingered with what we would and should leave behind. Salò stages an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 1785 text, The 120 Days of Sodom, transposed into the short-lived fascist Republic of Salò in northern Italy (1943-45). The film is famously graphic, including sequences of torture, killing, and various kinds of sexual violence that are exquisitely precise and consistently painstaking.

According to the late Pasolini’s detractors, it’s precisely this precision that’s perverse, or worse, because it’s as if the camera had been recruited to participate in the process its director claimed Salò had set out to decry: a process that is aestheticizing even as it is exploitative and destructive. Consider the early sequences in which the film’s four fascist libertines—representing the nobility, the church, the state, and finance—audition young victims of both sexes with scrupulous care, casting only the camera-ready for their orgies, orgies that are also lessons, this being a “School for Libertinage” (Sade 255). Or consider the awful series of tortures that unfolds in the film’s penultimate sequence. These tortures, too, are stage-managed with the utmost care, proving that even when they’re administering fatal punishments, Pasolini’s libertines do not give their desire free rein, but instead remain bound by the regolamenti, the regulations, that bind them together. So too does Salò‘s camera remain, atypically for Pasolini, controlled, quiet, and methodical in its movements.² Registering the rules’ continued force with its formal precision and fixity, the camera is also committed to heightening the libertines’ choreography, to framing their already painterly compositions to good effect, as when we look with one of the libertines through his binoculars (held backwards) at the courtyard in which the tortures are taking place, where victims’ bodies have already been carefully and symmetrically arranged. Because the binoculars are held backwards, this is a strangely distancing subjective shot, but a key example all the same of the camera’s aestheticizing work.³ Through this work, Pasolini’s film mimics—takes its cues from and assists—the men who oversee the tortures. And for this irresponsible aestheticization, the story goes, for Salò‘s sustained, tasteless, and politically dangerous intimacy with power, the late Pasolini should never be forgiven.⁴

Fig. 1 Salò‘s courtyard, seen through inverted binoculars

But there is, as I have indicated, another account according to which Pasolini has not only been forgiven many times over but recast as a prophet of current political or biopolitical realities. This second story is hagiographic, and it has been widely disseminated over the past two decades. Those who tell this story counter the late Pasolini’s detractors by noting that if Salò is hard to see, so too is our world of bare life and resurgent sovereignty, of unabashed exploitation and the end of the citizen-subject’s autonomy.⁵ Indeed, Salò‘s defenders have argued cogently and often compellingly for the film’s lasting relevance. They have shown that Pasolini’s late work speaks to a range of urgent contemporary debates. Seldom, though, have these critics lingered on Salò‘s images or tarried with the uncomfortable question of complicity. There is instead a rush to bypass, an effort to look through rather than at the film in these accounts, which frequently refer not to the film’s images but to what they signify.⁶ And they have been seen to signify everything from “the eclipse of desire” in the present to “current methods of biopower,” where the operative word in the last phrase is “current.”⁷ By this account Salò looks forward-looking, like our contemporary. Made just over forty years ago, the film uncannily anticipates our politics and our predicaments, today.

To be sure, critics who make arguments like these—including, most forcefully, systematically, and instructively, Alessia Ricciardi—follow the lead of the allegorizing cover story that the director himself provided when he said that sex in the film was merely a “metaphor for power” (“Il sesso” 2063). Indeed, Pasolini claimed repeatedly that he had sought, in Salò, to expose contemporary capitalist power at its purest, its most “anarchic” (“Il sesso” 2065-6). But if we take Pasolini at his word here—or if, forgetting that a metaphor asks to be read, we take him to mean that the film’s images are so many veils to strip away or see through—then it becomes difficult to account for the film’s painstaking construction, and even more so for its insistent backwardness: its fascination with fascism and its fixation on Sade, its staging of ritual tableaux and its retrograde interest in “sodomy.” This interest contrasts starkly with the liberated—and still celebrated—sexual exuberance of the director’s previous three films, his Trilogy of Life. Some of the films he made before the Trilogy, ranging from La rabbia (1963) to Teorema (1968), had indeed shown postwar capitalist power recognizably—that is, in images in which spectators might have recognized themselves readily. Salò is instead set in a past that, by most accounts, was never to be repeated, that was supposed to have been left behind. It was therefore easy for Salò‘s spectators to regard the film as if it were not about them at all. For Salò is first and foremost about fascist and Sadean power—forms of power whose apparent remoteness from the present might have reassured viewers who tended to relegate fascism and Sade to pasts long since superseded. These same spectators might have tended to imagine sadistic sexual practices as confined to present worlds that they chose not to enter. Thus if the film was meant to force spectators to recognize their present, then it is not clear why the film itself placed so many obstacles in the way of recognition, why it provided so many alibis, rendering power in such spectacular and patently past forms when its goal was to decry a type of power that was all too present and banal.

Again, recent readings have more often praised Salò for its “proleptic insight” than they have attended to such obstacles and alibis (Ricciardi, “Rethinking Salò“). That is, critics have insisted on Salò‘s prescience and defended the film on precisely these grounds—so much so, I would argue, that the film’s pastness has been all but forgotten, and its pedagogy all but forfeited.⁸ The film’s backwardness has been understated, overlooked, or obscured in many recent analyses. But it is only by staying with this backwardness that we can begin to learn Salò‘s lesson. This means looking at—as well as reading—the film. Rather than labeling the late Pasolini either prophetic or apocalyptic, either “saving” or simply pathological, it means responding to Salò‘s specificity, and refusing the ostensibly politicizing but effectively pacifying claim that sex in Salò is a mere “metaphor for power.” This claim sanitizes, desexualizes, and de-aestheticizes. It reassures us by giving us permission to feel that we are not implicated in, or at all ambivalent about, the film’s brutality. But that we are thus implicated and ambivalent becomes clear if we look long enough. In this sense, Pasolini’s detractors are on to something.⁹ I say this despite the fact that I will not be joining them in dismissing Salò. Nor, to be clear, will I be joining other critics who, adhering to neither of the two sets of views that I have sketched so far, defend the film but declare Pasolini’s “political analyses” altogether “failed” (Maggi 5). Although I build on Armando Maggi’s claim that “Pasolini’s works teach us a method of reading reality, not a set of historical beliefs” (5), I do not think that this “method of reading” can dispense with Pasolini’s critique of progress.¹⁰ On the contrary, this critique motivates my reading of Salò, a film that is nothing if not backward: “behindhand in progress” sexually, politically, and, as I will show, pedagogically (OED). Following the film’s own (backward) movement from text to image,¹¹ then, I contend that Salò‘s force derives from its ways of implicating us through a range of formal means. These are also ways of instructing us, where “instruction” does not refer to content delivery.

Pasolini in Detention

In the Italian context in particular, “instruction” was often, in the discourse of reformers leading up to and including the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, a disparaging name for what the old school was good for: nothing. A waste of time and talent, “instruction” stood opposed to the real education that, reformers argued, only the new school could provide. “Material, mechanical,” repetitive and ritual, rote and redundant, coercive, contentless, useless, merely outward, and, most emphatically, “dead,” like the Latin language that it privileged—instruction was what progressive educators wanted to replace.¹² They called for an education centered on inwardness and individuality, one that was Northern European in its provenance and that would therefore be capable of equipping Italian students for modernity, finally.

Two sets of facts are worth underscoring in this connection. First, while he was at work on Salò, Pasolini was also composing a text that he called a “trattatello pedagogico,” or “little pedagogical treatise” (Gennariello 15). In this text, without addressing instruction directly, Pasolini calls Rousseau—whose Émile inaugurates the modern critique of the old school—”monstrous,” and says that he prefers to dedicate his treatise instead to the “shade of de Sade,” as if the latter figure could counter the former (Gennariello 33). Second—and this is key but ideologically counterintuitive—in Italy the ranks of self-styled Rousseauists, that is of ostensibly progressive educational reformers, included fascists, chief among them Gentile. Gentile’s own pedagogical treatises speak scathingly about “instruction” but soar rhetorically when calling for the modernization—and indeed the “liberation”—of Italian public education (La riforma 176). Gentile in fact became Minister of Education under Mussolini, and oversaw the implementation of a broad set of educational reforms in Italian public schools. (These reforms included the abolition of compulsory Latin for all students, and the surprising, instruction-advocating response from Antonio Gramsci that this measure prompted paves the way for Pasolini’s radical repurposing of the old school, though only indirectly.¹³) The framework that the Riforma Gentile put in place was one of the structural features of the state that persisted after the end of the war and the fall of the fascist regime (Wolff 81-2).¹⁴

These reforms were continuous with a whole strand in Italian educational discourse in both the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a long series of pedagogical theories that tried to yoke education to modernization, and that made schooling a matter of catching up, of overcoming the national predicament known as arretratezza, or belatedness (Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect). Such catching up was still compulsory in the postwar period. Indeed, as Paola Bonifazio shows in Schooling in Modernity, her book about the state-and corporate-sponsored deployment of documentary film in postwar Italy, in this context the demand to catch up intensified. This demand accompanied another that has been a central concern in recent scholarship in both Italian historiography and film studies: a postwar imperative to paper over the fascist past, to render it a closed “parenthesis” in Benedetto Croce’s infamous formulation, and to do this in order to reconstitute the nation as good object.¹⁵ Even or perhaps especially among mainstream communists, the need to lay claim to and enshrine the antifascist resistance trumped any real reckoning with the recent past or attempt to work through it.¹⁶ Forward-thinking, sponsored filmmakers like those Bonifazio studies and politicians on the left alike thus shared in a consensus that pretended to leave the regime behind, that preserved “distinctions between the fascist past and the democratic present” (Fogu 156), and that trained the national gaze on the present and future of progress defined as economic growth.¹⁷

Against this consensus, Pasolini loudly protested. He came to associate modernization with monoculture—with “homogenization,” “cultural genocide,” and what he calls, in a beautiful, lyrical, proto-ecocritical essay, “the disappearance of the fireflies” (“L’articolo delle lucciole”). For Pasolini, capitalist modernity, far from delivering the freedom it promised, entailed the destruction of older forms of life and led to the foreclosure of possibilities for thought and action, imagination and memory. Indeed, the essays that Pasolini wrote during the last years of his life go so far as to claim that what he alternately names neo-capitalism and neo-fascism—that is, capitalism in its post-war, consumer-driven guise—is more totalizing, more pernicious, and in fact more fascist than fascism itself. Whereas the regime had ruled through an “irregimentazione superficiale, scenografica” [a superficial, scenic form of regimentation], Pasolini claims that under the new dispensation, which both is and isn’t new, regimentation has become “real,” an accomplished fact and no longer an aspiration (“Fascista” 233). Power now lays claim to hearts and minds as well as bodies, and power thus internalized can level whole forms of life, including the forms of life of fireflies.

These are the forms of life that Pasolini’s other films are famous for rendering. And the Pasolini we know how to love traveled everywhere—first all over Italy, then all over the world—in search of cultures not yet conquered by modernity. This effort took him from the subproletarian borgate, or suburbs, surrounding Rome, where he began his film career in the early 1960s, to Yemen in the early and mid-1970s, where he filmed both a documentary on the modernization of the city of Sana’a, Le mure di Sana’a (1971), and Il fiore delle Mille e una notte [The Thousand and One Nights] (1974), the last film he made before Salò, other parts of which were filmed in Ethiopia, Iran, and elsewhere. Such were the lengths to which the filmmaker had to go, he noted, to find even momentary escapes from a capitalism and a conformism that now covered and stultified all of Italy and most of the rest of the world. So it was bound to feel like a betrayal when Pasolini announced that he would stop this travel, because “integrating power” had become altogether inescapable (“Abiura” 71). This power left him with no alternative but to retreat, return, stay in.

Staying in, at least, is what he claimed to be doing in a text called “Abiura dalla Trilogia della vita,” the “Abjuration” or “Repudiation of the Trilogy of Life.” In this short essay, Pasolini distances himself from—indeed, renounces—the three features that he made before Salò, all of which had staged exuberant if not uncomplicated celebrations of youthful bodies and pleasures. No longer able to believe in the “lotta progressista,” the “progressive struggle,” for sexual liberation, Pasolini finds that the films in the trilogy have been co-opted by capitalism operating through a “tolerance as vast as it is false” (“Abiura” 72). In the “Abiura,” Pasolini writes that he has come to realize that any affirmative handling of bodies and pleasures would be similarly coopted, which is why he is herewith—in and through the “Abiura”—giving up the search for alternatives to what he finds in his immediate world. I cite his conclusion in the original as well as in translation, because it is truly a text over which to weep:

Dunque io mi sto adattando alla degradazione e sto accettando l’inaccettabile. Manovro per risistemare la mia vita. Sto dimenticando com’erano prima le cose. Le amate facce di ieri cominciano a ingiallire. Mi è davanti—pian piano senza più alternative—il presente. Riadatto il mio impegno ad una maggiore leggibilità (Salò?). (Pasolini, “Abiura” 76, original emphasis)

[Therefore I am adapting to degradation and am accepting the unacceptable. I am maneuvering to rearrange my life. I am forgetting the way things were before. The beloved faces of yesterday begin to yellow. In front of me is—little by little without any more alternatives—the present. I re-adapt my commitment to a greater legibility. (Salò?)]

These are the essay’s last sentences: six declaratives whose finality is finally if only subtly undermined by the question mark that hovers in the concluding parenthesis.

These words, and the whole essay, are by now well known. Roberto Esposito, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, and Rei Terada are just some of the many critics who have recently considered its relevance to contemporary conditions of impasse. To my knowledge, though, no one has yet undertaken to read the text’s weird parenthesis as a corrective to Croce’s. Recall that, for Croce, a parenthesis names what’s over and done with, a case that’s closed. Here instead Pasolini’s question about his own film hangs in the air and makes us hesitate before turning the page; it forces us to revisit the last sentence to be sure we’ve understood. Which we haven’t quite, since neither, by his own indirect, interrogative admission, has the “I” who signs the declaration. The parenthetical question in the “Abiura” lingers, remains unresolved; far from effecting, it enigmatically prevents the achievement of closure and the abandonment of what’s come before.

This is striking not least because Pasolini’s avowed goal in the “Abiura” is to announce that he’s abandoning the past in two senses: he is repudiating his own past projects, and, since these were themselves projects of filmic recovery, he is also renouncing the whole impulse to look for ways out of, and for life-giving alternatives to, the postwar capitalist present. But let’s return to the sentences that I have been reading. They are at once deliberative and affect-laden: the verb manovrare, recalling as it does the Gramscian guerra manovrata or “war of maneuver,” and the calculating notion of risistemare, rearranging or more literally re-systematizing, one’s life—these grate against the “beloved faces of yesterday” that are now beginning to fade. It thus becomes impossible to tell whether accepting the unacceptable is a matter of pathos or of resignation. Which suggests, of course, that it is both: the “Abiura” depicts a world in which all passion is spent, but it does so passionately rather than dispassionately, as when, in his penultimate sentence, Pasolini considers the present that he sees before him “little by little without any more alternatives,” where these phrases—suspended between dashes that sustain the hopes soon to be dashed—postpone the inevitable.

To postpone the inevitable is to do something other than simply accept it. This is Pasolini in detention, for “detention” also names “a keeping from going or proceeding; hindrance to progress; compulsory delay” (OED). In this sense, the phrases “pian piano senza più alternative,” phrases that are dilatory, detaining, even while they usher in the end, emblematize the “Abiura” as a whole. For the text protests too much, encircling the faces that it pretends to leave behind, and remembering the forms of life that it claims to be forgetting. The “Abiura” everywhere betrays an ongoing attachment to all that it says it forswears. In this way, Pasolini’s essay, like his late poetry, looks to “schemi letterari collaudati [proven or time-tested literary schemas]” (Trasumanar 66), drawing on what Anne-Lise François calls poetry’s peculiar “power to conjure and linger with what it claims not to mean and not to have” (“‘The feel'” 462). Indeed, the “Abiura” is a poetic text in this specific sense: the essay participates in the lyric mode that involves continuing the very thing that one claims to be discontinuing—as when Petrarch, of all people, announces at a particularly low point in his love life: “Mai non vo’ più cantar com’io soleva [I never want to sing the way I used to anymore]” (209). But here the point is that the poet makes this announcement in a canzone, that is, precisely by singing the way he used to and the way he’ll continue to for many, many poems to come. Recanting remains a form of cantar, of singing. The palinode—the kind of poem whose speaker says, “I take it back”—remains an ode.¹⁸ So too does Pasolini’s “Abiura,” I am claiming.

Reading Salò

This way of reading—a lectio difficilior or reading in detention—has important implications for understanding Salò, and in what’s left of this essay I will indicate the difference it makes. That it is indeed reading that’s at issue for any viewer of Salò the “Abiura” already suggests in its last sentence: “I re-adapt my commitment to a greater legibility (Salò?).” But what is “legibility”? And how does it organize Salò? The film offers a first answer in the form of an “Essential Bibliography,” which appears near the end of the film’s opening credit sequence. If the “Abiura” is one text that mediates our access to Salò‘s images, this list of sources is another. The frame signals the film’s aspiration to participate in, and perhaps to complicate, a French philosophical conversation.¹⁹ James Steintrager has also compared the “Bibliografia” to the legitimating forewords that appeared before translations of Sade’s works, some of which are in fact named here by Pasolini (357). (De Beauvoir’s essay “Must We Burn Sade?” and part of Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbor, for instance, both still appear before the Grove Press English translation of The 120 Days of Sodom.) These prefatory gestures were meant to preempt censorship by establishing the high seriousness of the novels they introduced. If these novels were worthy of the attention of French philosophers, the thinking went (at a time when French philosophers had not lost prestige), then obscenity charges would be defused in advance. “[R]edeeming social value” would be guaranteed (qtd. in Steintrager 356).

Fig. 2 Salò‘s “Bibliografia essenziale”

There are several other ways to interpret Pasolini’s invocation of these figures in Sade’s reception and postwar “rehabilitation,” and it is interesting to note the figures left off the list, whose readings of Sade are implicitly deemed inessential: Horkheimer and Adorno, Bataille, Lacan.²⁰ In my view, though, what matters most is simply that the film begins by assigning required reading. At the outset, that is, Salò interpellates the viewer as a pupil. But the question then becomes: what kind of student is the viewer enjoined to be or become? I cannot claim to be the only viewer at once ardent and compliant enough to have read, in order, all of the texts enumerated here, but I can attest, after having learned the hard way, that the exercise is a slog and ultimately unrewarding. In fact, I would even call the bibliography somewhat sadistic: it holds out the thrilling if pedantic promise that the texts it lists will somehow disclose Salò‘s significance. But no “essential” insight, no solution to the riddle, is in fact forthcoming. On the contrary, the bibliography constitutes a time-consuming misdirection.²¹

This suggests that, whatever else it may be, “legibility” for the late Pasolini is not transparency. Still less is Salò‘s pedagogy a matter of what I have called content delivery. Instead it entails instruction, defined not as education, let alone as edification, but rather, as in the discourse of progressive educational reform, as an experience of often painfully inflicted tasks that impose on students’ time. Here, however, rather than being refused, such instruction is affirmed and even administered. But to what end? In Salò, Pasolini returns to and repurposes instruction to counter the forgetting of the fascist past and its structural persistence. To do this is also to reintroduce temporal contradiction into a context of presentist consensus. Against the progressive claim sanctioned by the state, schools, and films alike that the past is past and closed, parenthesis-wise, Salò brings the bad old news of all that is not abandoned when old eras are declared ended, and old fixations outgrown. In such a context, infliction and imposition become necessary because kinder and gentler teacherly means—respectful of our space and our spontaneity and rooted in a belief in our freedom (the fascist Gentile was, again, a great believer in our freedom)—would not forcefully register the survival of the past from which we are not free.²²

To be sure, there is also an account of our unfreedom in what I have called the allegorizing reading of Salò, a presentist reading authorized by Pasolini’s own claim that sex in his film is only a “metaphor for power.” Yet, if only unwittingly, proponents of this reading imply that we should look through Salò‘s images to what they signify, symbolize, or metaphorize. But imagine reading right past the vehicle in a poem to access the tenor that it “hides,” as if the latter weren’t at all affected by the former. By this account Salò is not about this casting call or beauty pageant but about bare life; not about that whipping but about contemporary sovereignty. This argument, which effectively lets viewers off the hook, runs directly counter to mine. It is obviously not a progressive argument, since it is about how much we have regressed in recent years, but like progressive educational theory from Rousseau to Gentile, it spares us the work and the formative ordeal of returning to the past that Salò repeats. We can better understand the terms of this repetition and the value of the ordeal to which it leads by turning to another category, related to instruction: ritual.²³

Lands of Regret

Again, Pasolini claimed that Salò was “conceived as a rite” (Bachmann 42). Unlike many recent readers of the film, I take this claim seriously, as a prompt to think through the film’s complex and programmatic engagement with ritual. I also take this claim to be more instructive, because more demanding, than the allegorizing or metaphorizing claim that I have already considered. For if a metaphor can all too easily be treated as a means of content delivery—as a vehicle to be seen through in a search for tenors or referents—a rite, by contrast, is undergone as a process.²⁴ Or it is resisted. Or resistance becomes inseparable from the experience of undergoing it.

Rites recur in a book that I think can shed light on Salò, more than those listed in the film’s bibliography: Ernesto De Martino’s La terra del rimorso, or The Land of Regret. First published in 1961, De Martino’s book gathers a range of ethnographic and historical reflections on tarantismo, the set of ritual practices associated with the treatment of poisonous spider bites in Puglia, in southern Italy. The text centers on the returns of malignant symptoms among the predominantly female tarantate, those supposedly bitten and re-bitten by spiders, “bitten again” being another meaning of the rimorso in De Martino’s title. De Martino is especially interested in ritual cures for these symptoms, cures that turn out to imitate the symptoms so closely as to be indistinguishable from them.²⁵ These cures were, interestingly in the context of Salò, orgiastic in antiquity. Considering their social role in the present, De Martino reads these rites neither as matters of superstition nor as instances of mental illness, but as ways of responding to what he calls “il cattivo passato che torna,” “the bad past that returns” (13).

Fig. 3 From Gian Franco Mingozzi, La Taranta (1962), made in consultation with Ernesto De Martino

A passage from the anthropologist’s conclusion underscores this return’s relevance to De Martino’s present:

Today we know that the “prick” of remorse is not the attack of a demon or of a god, but the bad past that returns…. But precisely because we know these things—and the contemporary world has procured for us too much of this bitter knowledge—tarantismo activates our interest once again and becomes a live question that concerns us intimately. On the other hand, precisely because our consciousnesses have never been so buffeted by the individual and collective past as they are today, and precisely because our souls are beset by the search for operative symbols that might be adequate to our humanism and to our sense of history…tarantismo is not indifferent to us, but rather almost compels us to measure with it the ensnared powers of our modernity. In this sense, if the Land of Regret is Puglia in that it is the elective fatherland of tarantismo, the pilgrims who visited it in the summer of ’59 [De Martino himself and his team] come from a vaster land that in the end awaits the same name, a land that extends even to the limits of the world inhabited by men [sic]. (272-73)

What begins as a confident statement about the difference between “us” and those who still believe in gods, monsters, malevolent spiders, and miracle cures thus ends with a virtual erasure of this very difference. Locating the modern researchers, tellingly renamed “pilgrims,” in a land that is also one of regret (though one that doesn’t know itself), and then further widening the boundaries of this land so that it encompasses the whole inhabited world, De Martino all but undoes the distinction that he initially establishes above between the backward and benighted tarantate and the modern, metropolitan men who have undertaken to observe them. Yet on another level this distinction is preserved or sublated, because it is the latter who stand to learn from the former, and it is difference that makes this learning possible.²⁶ Since souls in “our modernity” are tasked with searching for the kinds of “operative symbols” that remain operative in the realm of tarantismo, the remorseful Southerners effectively teach their northern visitors. Measured against—or rather with, as De Martino more forcefully writes—tarantismo, “our humanism” and our “history” cannot remain the same; they cannot, that is, after the lessons of the Land of Regret, remain the possessions of moderns who either claim to have superseded the past, or who rush to catch up with those who have. De Martino’s text thus both thematizes and models a way of relating to the past that resists its subsumption by the present.²⁷

Pasolini and De Martino clearly share an interest in the ritual resources available in non-modern worlds. Both suggest, moreover, that such resources might still be accessed and set to work to redress an ailing modernity.²⁸ But Pasolini is typically said to have abandoned this hope by the time he made Salò.²⁹ I have shown, however, that the “Abiura,” which purports to announce this abandonment, does something else as well. We can now say that that text dwells in the Land of Regret: it enacts and reenacts the return of the bad past that De Martino traces through the Puglia of the tarantate, only to argue that it happens everywhere, that the return is not regional.³⁰

This return structures Salò, including at the level of the image. A pair of sequences can illustrate this organizing principle. In the villa’s main hall—where the libertines, their female storytelling assistants, and the guards and victims all gather for assemblies when what Sade calls “school” is in session—Signora Vaccari (who was, incidentally, born in a school) presides over two storytelling scenes. To begin with, the narratrice regales the congregation with an account of her early life. A victim has already disappointed one libertine, and now another victim ineptly masturbates the financier. Seeing this, Signora Vaccari breaks off her story, declaring that something must be done. Prompted by this declaration or by something else, a young curly-haired girl, looking dazed, suddenly runs to the nearest window and tries to jump out. Guards stop her, and we see her struggling as they carry her away—but only for several seconds, because it is mealtime, and after a dissolve the struggle is succeeded by the first of several banquet scenes.

Lunch is eventful. Victims working as waitresses are (in the film’s language) sodomized, as is the eager and ever idiotic financier. Two other libertines philosophize, and a narratrice reminisces. Out of nowhere, everyone sings a partisan song—pointedly out of place, of course, in this fascist redoubt. After this, a mannequin is brought in, and the masturbation lesson promised by Signora Vaccari is finally given, to the delight of libertines, storytellers, and soldiers alike. At this point the viewer has all but forgotten about the escape or suicide attempt that immediately preceded the meal. But the film provides an aggressive reminder, enacting the return of the diegetic “bad past.” Back in the main hall, the whole group is pictured: signori and storytellers, victims and soldiers, all again gathered silently around the altar, which now has its wings closed. After a sign is given, these wings, painted to look like curtains, open to reveal the would-be escapee, now dead. Two shots show that the girl’s throat has been cut, but Signora Vaccari quickly resumes her storytelling. A crude painting that sits atop the altar, anomalous in a villa famously full of modernist artworks, depicts a haloed Madonna and her Child.³¹ This painting was shown frontally only once, very briefly in the background during the scene before lunch, its appearance coinciding with the girl’s attempt to escape. Now the Madonna is more prominently visible, since the storyteller positions herself immediately before the painting. She steps aside, then paces back and forth repeatedly, to reveal, then conceal, then reveal again the dead girl, flat on her back, who has become the painting’s extension or its refutation. The girl’s body disappears from view, then reappears, is alternately covered and uncovered by Signora Vaccari’s dress. Now you see her; now you don’t; then again you do. The victim’s intermittent visibility instantiates the return of the bad past that Salò stages. For the viewer, each reappearance becomes a brief experience of what De Martino calls ri-morso: a re-bite.

Fig. 4 Before

Fig. 5 After

Fig. 6 Victim

Fig. 7 “Another story”

Fig. 8 “Another story”

But the static image of the Madonna presides over these reappearances. The painting’s sustained presence onscreen contrasts with the dead girl’s disappearances and returns. The Madonna thus marks one place where Salò reflects on its own status as image, drawing on what Georges Didi-Huberman calls the tradition of “critical images.” These he understands as primarily ritual, rather than representational, in their function.³² More specifically, Didi-Huberman argues that critical images engage in “a perpetual ‘putting to death'” in order to counter “the common desire” or collective determination to forget it (Confronting Images 220). The critical image thus constitutes an answer to, and an effort to undo, collective disavowal. Likewise, as both a rite and what Pasolini more specifically calls a “sacra rappresentazione” (“Il sesso” 2066)—referring backward to a tradition traceable to early modern Tuscany, that birthplace of perspectival vision where, dialectically, Didi-Huberman locates resources for thinking the image otherwise—Salò seeks to counter the progressive wish to abandon the fascist past.³³

All That Behind

This wish is distilled in Michel Foucault’s response to what he saw as the “sacralization” of Sade in Salò. Foucault objected in particular to the film’s investment in “an eroticism of the disciplinary type”:

After all, I would be willing to admit that Sade formulated an eroticism proper to the disciplinary society: a regulated, anatomical, hierarchical society whose time is carefully distributed, its spaces partitioned, characterized by obedience and surveillance.

It’s time to leave all that behind, and Sade’s eroticism with it. We must invent with the body, with its elements, surfaces, volumes, and thicknesses, a nondisciplinary eroticism—that of a body in a volatile and diffused state, with its chance encounters and unplanned pleasures.(“Sade, Sergeant of Sex” 226-7, my emphasis)

Elsewhere Foucault complicates this understanding of historical sequence, attending to sovereignty’s survival after its ostensible eclipse, its living-on into the era of discipline, and discipline’s living-on into the age of governmentality (Security 8, 107). Still, there is something almost irresistible about the progressive invitation and interpellation, offered here with the poignant assurance of being on the present’s side: “It’s time to leave all that behind.” We can recognize in this response to Salò a version of the impulse to abandon the past that I am arguing the film itself works to counter. In fact, Salò points up in advance the wishfulness of Foucault’s thinking, the utopianism of his search for “a nondisciplinary eroticism.” The film also lets us see—or rather, forces us to see—the progressivism that implicitly underwrites even queer theories inspired by Foucault’s call for reinvented bodies and pleasures.

Leo Bersani, for instance, famously places complicity at the center of his account of gay male sexuality in essays like “Is the Rectum a Grave?”³⁴ This text takes pains to position its understanding of sex against the “pastoral impulse” that Bersani detects in his contemporaries’ accounts—accounts of sex’s radical potential to establish communal solidarities (22). Seeking to correct what he takes to be the idealization operative in such accounts, Bersani offers instead a theory of gay male sex that sees it as working through the ruthlessness in which it traffics, in order to become a paradoxically “hygienic practice of nonviolence” (30). In this practice, rigorously pursued, being penetrated by the other becomes a form of “self-debasement” (27) or “self-dismissal” (30), in and through which gay men give up their entitlements as bearers of “proud subjectivity” (29), enacting instead a willingness to relinquish the self capable of cleansing this self of other-directed violent drives. Hence Bersani’s description of such sex as “hygienic.” Masochism of a particular kind becomes an answer to sadistic urges; the care of the self through the arrangement of its “shattering” can, in time, stem this self’s impingements on the world.

Salò offers no perspective whatsoever from which sex could be seen to lead to such a “shattering” or salutary weakening. The film thus makes it possible to see that “pastoralization,” or something like it, lingers in Bersani’s quest for a paradoxical kind of cleanliness. Bersani hopes that intimacy with and even careful contamination by male power can be made to yield a nonviolent and all but uncontaminated result. By contrast, Salò‘s intimacy with its libertines is not finally purgative, but rather repetitive. The film compels us to take insistent if intermittent and uncomfortable pleasure in the old erotics from which Foucault wanted us to graduate.

Here again, a pair of sequences is illustrative, not least because it flagrantly violates the rule—or indeed the restraining order—that others see as operative in the film, whereby sex in Salò, as a mere “metaphor for power,” can only take the form of “brutal assaults involving no foreplay and no undressing, aimed at the humiliation of naked, defenseless, and otherwise inert bodies” (Ricciardi, “Rethinking Salò“). In the second of the film’s two wedding scenes, an executive assistant named Guido helps the Bishop to officiate. (Salò is evidently a place in which gay marriage has been legalized. So even a “backward” reading of the film, like mine, cannot but find prophecies.) The Bishop chants while the other libertines march in, each beaming and arm in arm with a miserable-looking male victim. Guido, for his part, remains obliging. While the ceremony is in session, the camera frames the Bishop’s briefs, covered by his gauzy red gown, in a sustained close-up that contradicts the common wisdom according to which Salò privileges long and medium shots. After approaching the Bishop from behind, Guido fondles him. A quick cut then follows.

Fig. 9 Officiant

Fig. 10 Executive Assistant

Fig. 11 Fondling

Fig. 12 Close-Up

The film has so far trained viewers to expect nothing to follow from fondling in general, for it has never allowed anything resembling a “sex scene” to unfold. Hand job, instead, has been heaped upon hand job—but always interruptedly. The close-up that concludes Salò‘s second wedding scene startles, then, by giving way to an image of coupling that is conventional if contra natura.³⁵ In this next scene, the Bishop and his assistant are shown going at it as the camera engages in an elaborate dance, a back and forth between nearness and medium distance that prompts us to admire, not only to recoil from, this instance of intimacy. Sex is followed by kissing and tender talk that both bespeaks consent and projects that consent into the future. And this from a director who claimed, in the “Abiura,” to be giving up on, and indeed to “hate,” bodies and their sex organs (73). In this scene, the camera gives the lie to that claim: those bodies and organs are shot, and lit, lovingly.

To be clear, this moment of mutual satisfaction in the midst of “brutal assaults” (Ricciardi, “Rethinking Salò“)—and of consent in the midst of constant coercions—matters not because it renders the other sex acts shown in Salò any less diegetically demeaning or casts any doubt on their cruelty. It matters instead because, if we look at and linger on the moments that Guido shares with the Bishop—rather than assume that sex in the film holds no visual interest but simply allegorizes and anticipates—we begin to learn the lesson embedded in a scene that might at first look like a mere anomaly. Imagining a republic whose ruling elite do anything but “abdicate power” when they engage in same-sex sex (Bersani, “Rectum” 19, original emphasis), Salò also addresses a reality in which disciplinarians are still at large. One does not depose such figures by saying, with Foucault, that it’s high time to leave them behind.

Fig. 13 Wedding Night (1)

Fig. 14 Wedding Night (2)

Fig. 15 Wedding Night (3)

This path through Foucault and Bersani thus leads, however improbably, back to school. For Salò‘s lesson was not that its viewers simply lived in the “bad past” represented by the film’s Republic of Salò, but rather that they could not merely leave this past and place behind by deciding that, in keeping with progress, it was time to do so. For Pasolini, the old school taught this lesson, as tarantismo did for De Martino.³⁶ This is why Pasolini’s return to fascist “irregimentazione scenografica” (“Fascista” 233), a return “conceived as a rite,” also returns to instruction (Bachmann 42).³⁷ Salò makes Sade’s “School for Libertinage” into an old school that gives ritual form to the “bad past” denied by official discourses of progress. These discourses would have us bypass the experience of rimorso by which alone we might redress “our modernity,” according to De Martino (273). Salò, by contrast, sets such remorse to work, and it is as a remorseful pedagogical ritual that the film still operates most powerfully. “Ci riguarda da vicino” indeed, in De Martino’s words—it looks at us up close and concerns us intimately—because, as the film’s reception shows, the land of regret remains a place that we would abandon, that we pretend to have left behind. This place’s claim on us is what Salò would have us learn the hard way.

Footnotes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Italian are my own.

1. Versions of this pathologizing response range from the early, phobic consensus distilled in Uberto Quintavalle’s memoir Giornate di Sodoma to Georges Didi-Huberman’s recent account of the apocalyptic turn and “the death and disappearance of survivals” in Pasolini’s last works (Come le lucciole). For more on Pasolini’s pathologization see Benedetti, and for a cogent response to Didi-Huberman and defense of the late Pasolini, see Ricciardi (“Pasolini for the Future”).

2. Pasolini says that he wants Salò to be “a formally perfect film” and contrasts this perfectionist approach to his earlier, messy, “magmatic” procedure in Bachmann (43).

3. See Bersani and Dutoit, for whom, in the film, “[h]orror is almost constantly forestalled by a multiplication of aesthetic appeals” (29). The binoculars’ framing in this sequence constitutes, in their view, one such appeal, an appeal that is compatible with and even enhanced by estrangement. In contrast, Ricciardi sees these backward binoculars as part of the film’s effort to thwart both aesthetic and erotic enjoyment by ruling out “perverse proximity” in all its forms (“Rethinking Salò“). For an account that differs from Ricciardi’s as well as Bersani’s and Dutoit’s, instead emphasizing the sense of “suffocating nearness” produced by this shot, see Copjec (203). And for a more recent reading of the same sequence that likewise stresses “identification” and complicity, see Annovi (44).

4. To my mind, the best account of aestheticization in the film remains Bersani and Dutoit. But whereas Bersani and Dutoit associate Salò‘s aestheticization with “saving frivolity” and think that the film thus displays “Pasolini’s refusal to be fixed—better, to be transfixed—by his subject” (29), I see no such saving and no such refusal in the film.

5. On Salò and bare life, see Ricciardi (“Rethinking Salò“) and on the film as forecasting the end of “the autonomy of the citizen-subject,” see Copjec (229). Other recent readings that value Salò for its prophetic qualities include Recalcati (23-9), Ravetto, and Indiana (90).

6. For a notable exception, see Rhodes.

7. See Recalcati (Il complesso di Telemaco 23-9), and on “the eclipse of desire” more generally, see Recalcati (“L’eclisse dei desideri”). On “current methods of biopower” as they figure proleptically in the film, see, again, Ricciardi (“Rethinking Salò“).

8. For a recent, brief discussion of Salò‘s pedagogy, see Chiesi (132-5). On the pedagogical impulse in Pasolini more generally, see Zanzotto, and also Stone.

9. There is therefore some truth to the film’s first spectators’ sense that Pasolini must have been symptomatically “fixated” on both the fascist and Sadean pasts. See, for instance, Quintavalle (14, 22). Indeed, Pasolini’s Salò Republic bears more than a passing resemblance to the “province” to which Freud alludes in an early letter discussing fixation: “in a certain province fueros [ancient laws or local sovereignties] are still in force, we are in the presence of ‘survivals'” (208). Freud here maps the political onto the psychic, so that fixation becomes a matter of fueros within. I will be arguing, against Didi-Huberman (Come le lucciole), that we are still very much “in the presence of survivals” in Salò. To repeat this Freudian claim, though, is not to suggest that Salò is a mere record of its director’s psychopathology, as his detractors would contend.

10. I refer readers who would discount such a critique as inherently “conservative”—or simply counterproductive under current conditions—to recent work in fields ranging from black studies, to queer theory and from visual studies to ecocriticism, and beyond. See, to name only a few, Berger, Dayan, François (Open Secrets), Freeman, Love, and Sexton. For an earlier example, see Horkheimer and Adorno. And for a reading of Salò that both considers and extends this critique, see Terada.

11. On the movement from word to image as regression, see Bollas (111-12). In the art historical context, see Warburg (8) and Didi-Huberman (Confronting Images 149).

12. This sentence reworks and adds to the litany of charges against “instruction” found in Gentile (La riforma 186).

13. For some of Gramsci’s pages on Latin and “instruction,” see the Quaderni, vol. 3 (1544-6) and the Prison Notebooks (37-9).

14. On other persisting features of the fascist state, see Fogu, who concludes: “Most of the administrative, judicial, and even police apparatus of the fascist state and party was left untouched and effortlessly integrated into the new republican order” (152).

15. See, for a historiographic instance, De Bernardi, and for an example from film studies see Fabbri. For Croce’s “parenthesis,” see Croce (3), and on the ongoing ideological work of this image, see Fogu (149). Elsewhere Fogu notes that it was not until 1976, when “the famous televised debate between historians Denis Mack Smith and Renzo De Felice” was broadcast, that, “Fascism was suddenly brought out of the representational closet and in such a way that the Crocean image of a fascist parenthesis in Italian history [began to be] thoroughly delegitimized” (158-9). It was thus in the context of this closet—and, I am arguing, in an effort to counter its effects—that Pasolini made Salò.

16. This is just one of many problems addressed by Fortini, whose essay “The Writer’s Mandate and the End of Anti-Fascism” treats “the anti-fascist myth” mainly as a hindrance to revolution (53). Fortini also reminds readers, however, that such a reckoning would have made it possible to recognize fascism’s relation to capital, rather than grant the “definition of fascism as ‘enemy of civilisation’—including bourgeois civilisation” (45). Seeing fascism as an extension or weapon of the latter would instead mean confronting continuities between the postwar period and the decades that preceded it—which need not entail minimizing the “ruin” to which fascism leads (34).

17. Here I bracket the ultraleft movements associated with operaismo, or workerism, and Autonomia. But for a luminous recent discussion of these movements and their prefiguration in postwar culture, see Mansoor.

18. Compare Agamben’s reflections on “revocation” and “re-evocation” in Pasolini’s late work (though not in Salò specifically) (“From the Book” 93-94).

19. On Salò‘s response to these philosophical debates, see Ravetto (106).

20. Georges Bataille’s writings on Sade include “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade” (1930) and “Sade” (1957). Pasolini also refers to Bataille’s The Trial of Gilles de Rais as a source of inspiration for Salò, but without naming Bataille’s name (“Il sesso” 2063). Jacques Lacan’s “Kant with Sade” (1963) is perhaps more Pasolinian than any of the texts listed in Salò. And conversely: there is already something Lacanian about the performance of aggressive erudition that is the “Essential Bibliography.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published in Italian translation in 1966) also includes an “Excursus” on the Marquis that pairs his work with Kant’s.

21. Gian Maria Annovi reads the bibliography as “a sort of contrapasso for the spectator of the Trilogy, an intellectual punishment” (139-40).

22. For some of Gentile’s reflections on freedom in education, see his La riforma dell’educazione (e.g. 58-9). And for an earlier account attesting to the centrality of freedom in Gentile’s educational theory, see Gentile (“L’unità della scuola media”). To be sure, statements in favor of progressive-sounding educative freedom can be found in Pasolini’s writings. See, for instance, “Le mie proposte su scuola e Tv” (177). But such statements should be read alongside others that insist that one must not accept progressive pieties but rather learn to be “progressive in another way, inventing another way of being free” (“Due modeste proposte per eliminare la criminalità in Italia” 168).

23. On forms of repetition inseparable from the resistance that they might seem to block, see Comay. Pasolini considers ritual in his brief but suggestive review of a film to which Salò is heavily indebted: Marco Ferreri’s La grande abbuffata (Blow-Out, 1973) (“Le ambigue forme della ritualità narrativa”).

24. I am relying on Asad’s account, according to which ritual privileges practice over signification. Galluzzi eloquently describes Salò‘s assault on signification in Pasolini e la pittura (143).

25. For another account of “the disquieting indistinction between the ill and its remedy,” see Borch-Jacobsen (113).

26. This is already, then, the shift or “next stage” that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak locates in the “trajectory of the subaltern”: “Not to study the subaltern, but to learn” (440).

27. My reading of La terra del rimorso differs from Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi’s in her overview of De Martino’s works (57-60).

28. For a fuller consideration of Pasolini’s relationship to De Martino, though one that does not address La terra del rimorso specifically, see Subini (26-34). See also Ricciardi (“Pasolini for the Future”). Maggi treats this relationship as well, but he sees Pasolini and De Martino as ultimately opposed (7-8). According to Maggi, Pasolini reductively translates De Martino’s complex, non-dichotomous understanding of history into a neat and naive division between past and present: De Martino’s emphases are thus “at odds with Pasolini’s belief in a sharp dichotomy between the ‘then’ of a premodern condition and the ‘now’ of post-history” (7). I am instead attempting to highlight how Pasolini’s late work attests to the survival and the still-possible return of that which has been declared long gone. This is, in my view, a dynamic rather than dichotomous approach to history, one that does not declare any past over and done with definitively.

29. See, for instance, Maggi (7-8) and Didi-Huberman (Come le lucciole).

30. I borrow this formulation from Joan Copjec, who insists that psychoanalysis is “not a regional discourse” in Murray.

31. Galluzzi identifies this as an imitation of Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno (144 n164). For his part, Maggi emphasizes the Marian dimension of this image, so that Mary becomes one (absent) mother among many others in Salò (108-9).

32. Thus, according to Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico “reenacts” “a gesture of unction” when he splashes paint onto a wall, punctuating figurative paintings with non-figurative passages (Confronting Images 202-3). And thus Donatello learns from the makers of bóti, or death masks for the still-living Florentine nobility, that sculpture is a matter of casting as much as truth to life—of process, that is, as much as appearance (Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images 226). Thus, finally, the maker of a painting honoring St. Veronica sets aside his brush, preferring to render the saint’s cloth with cloth rather than realistically.

33. I cannot engage with the sacra rappresentazione or with Didi-Huberman’s account of the critical image in detail here. I note only that this engagement might complicate critical assertions that the film records the making of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” Whereas Agamben’s homo sacer can be “killed but not sacrificed” (85), Salò takes pains to render its killings sacrificial in Didi-Huberman’s sense if not in Bataille’s (Confronting Images 220).

34. On complicity, see also Bersani (Homos 90), and for a later reassessment of the arguments advanced in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” including its arguments for the radical potential of masochism, see Bersani (“Sociality and Sexuality”).

35. Gary Indiana memorably calls this “normal love” (83).

36. That the old school had long since sought to provide ritual forms for responding to the past that survived in the present is shown in Walter Ong’s classic, not to say old-school, essay “Latin Language Study as Renaissance Puberty Rite.”

37. To be sure, the phrase “conceived as a rite” is a contradiction in terms, for a rite cannot, strictly speaking, be conceived, at least not if it is to be socially efficacious. On the contrary, traditionally, “For ritual to function and operate it must first of all present itself and be perceived as legitimate, with…[its] symbols serving…to show that the agent does not act in his own name and on his own authority, but in his capacity as a delegate” (Bourdieu 115). (For an opposed account that centers on attempts to make the image efficacious from within “the ruins of representation and culture” and in the absence of social sanctioning, see Pandolfo.) There was, of course, no such delegation in Pasolini’s case; or rather, the director himself did the delegating. In this sense, there is a qualitative difference between the rituals observed by De Martino and those imagined by Pasolini: whereas the tarantate studied by the anthropologist had long sought cures in a communal context, even the most devoted of spectators attended a film “conceived as a rite” by its director alone.

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