From Serge Daney's Footlights: Critical Notebooks 1970–1982, translated by Nicholas Elliott and published by Semiotext(e). The series Never Look Away: Serge Daney's Radical 1970s screens January 26 through February 4 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975).
The fact that Salò is Pasolini’s last film doesn’t mean that it must at all costs be seen as his “will” (or a letter bomb, to be opened with caution: “No one indeed, so it seems, can recuperate it,” Roland Barthes said of the film).1 It’s simpler to see it as the reconstruction of what masters on the road to perdition would do in a final attempt to enjoy [jouir de] their power, in a comparable context (Italian fascism) and a similar setting (Salò).
It has too often been forgotten that, in the history of Italian fascism, the republic of Salò (September 1943–January 1944) is only the grotesque final act, the repetition as grand guignol of what had already failed as farce, the setting for “some last cowardly turpitudes.”2 Salò is not fascism triumphant, the kind that’s maintained by the support of the masses and a frenzy for conquest and the norm. Salò is instead, under the protection of machine guns, the (typically Sadean) enclosed space of a ridiculous excess of legislation and regulation, a madness of mise en scène. In this film as in all his films, Pasolini is not really interested in the question of the masses’ support for anything (including fascism).
The question that obsesses him is the opposite one. It’s not that there can be complicity between the torturer and his victims, masters and slaves, the dominant and the dominated; it’s that, on the contrary, there can be a fundamental heterogeneity between these groups. If a dividing line must be found between them, it certainly isn’t the Stalinist line that always puts perversion in the masters’ camp (for example, homosexuality, a “social crime”) and the innocent norm in that of the victims. Instead, the line passes between those (the masters) who are ready to do the worst to grasp what by definition can only escape them—“knowledge of the other’s jouissance”—and those for whom this question isn’t an issue and doesn’t exist (and who can therefore ingenuously practice what bourgeois morality labels as perversion, such as homosexuality). This particular dividing line is far more serious than the one that governs the usual games of S&M reversibility with its abject moralism (Kazan) or its schizoid aestheticism (Jancsó), without even getting into the idiocy of the “retro trend.”
For Pasolini, this was the premise of his “optimistic” trilogy: the people have a simple access to pleasure that nothing and no one can make a dent in. On the contrary, the masters desire to desire. In vain. To keep up the fiction of their desire, to find its cause, they violently summon the body of the people to examine (seduction, prostitution, torture, interrogation) its secret, to suppose it has an intrinsic jouissance that is to be regulated and fed upon. One could say that in Salò, they restage the spectacle of their long-standing failure, but this time in vitro. As they progress, they come to destroy the very object of the experimentation, the film’s raw material. The Sadean mise en scène is totally incapable of giving them the key to this disarming secret: access to pleasure.
Disarming. One could say: Pleasure is hardly anything when it comes to resisting barbarity. For Pasolini, popular resistance is not only refusal (the boy who tries to run away and gets gunned down, the girl who slits her throat), nor is it stating one’s allegiance to another kind of politics (the boy holding out his fist). There is also a resistance proportionate to the masters’ failure to obtain the slightest desire, an amoral resistance that can be spotted in the collection of small pleasures stolen from the despotic regulations, against all odds. Small pleasures, pairings born in the film’s lulls, in the moments when mastery slackens, and that are situated in the element of sameness, of people sticking to themselves. Young people sticking to themselves (by definition), boys (those who dance), girls (those who sleep), servants (the boy with the raised fist and the Black servant girl). For Pasolini, this sticking-to-themselves, this narcissism, serves to resist and form a defense against the masters’ strategy, the logic of which is to demand the most violent heterogeneity: assembling high and low, noble and disgusting, young and old, and so on.
The (future) victims yield to this mise en scène, some with disgust, others with resignation (“Do it for the Madonna,” one girl says to another), and others even with an amused detachment. Of what is demanded of them, they want to understand nothing, the masters’ jouissance reaches them like a succession of passing fancies and doesn’t concern them (even if it kills them). The realist aspect I referred to above, the exactness, is in this reproduction of the prostitutional situation. Here too, there isn’t much circulation between the “simple pleasures of the people” and the masters’ “desire to desire.”
This is confirmed by the film’s actual organization, its “form.” What’s atrocious isn’t only what’s captured in the shots (torture, coprophilia), it’s the traumatic nature of these shots, for nothing allows one to anticipate them. They’re like sudden escalations of horror where before there wasn’t even a hint of it. In Salò (and this is what makes the film so cruel), all the functions of engaging [embrayage] through which one generally recognizes the filmmaker’s desire to seduce and corrupt his spectator by presenting him with the pending fait accompli of his desire (for something to happen, for there to be fiction) are destined to absolute failure.
Consider the “historians.” They’re only so terribly ineffective, plain hopeless, and goofy because they’re the parody of what they are in Sade. In Sade, language is used (exhausted) in all its forms (to describe, convince, excite, warn, educate, ejaculate, narrate, etc.). In Pasolini, language fails to stir up any kind of fiction: the historians’ tales are weak, the masters’ remarks are inane, the victims are silent. And it isn’t only language that fails, it’s also vision. Nothing here for voyeurism. When the masters use binoculars to watch the torture at the end of the film, they always have another master in their visual field. Mastery only sees mastery.
Pasolini’s central idea, his weak-willed wish, is that there is nothing in common between executioners and victims or, for example, between the upper bourgeoisie and the people. This explains why he stops short of Wilhelm Reich’s question (“Why did the masses desire fascism?”). There is in Pasolini an “on principle” populism by which the people are totally indifferent to the master’s jouissance. It’s no coincidence if Pasolini primarily found (and also dreamed of) this version of the people in the past (the Middle Ages), culture (Boccaccio, Chaucer), and the Orient (The Thousand and One Nights). For fascism is something else. It’s when the question of resentment, that of an impossible knowledge of “the other’s jouissance” (see Daniel Sibony’s text, “remarques sur l’affect racial”),3 becomes a vital question for those whom Pasolini detests and ignores as much as he can: the petty bourgeois, the “petty-gentrified people.” Pasolini’s final despair: “There is nothing joyful about sex anymore. The young people are ugly and desperate, mean or defeated. Today sex is the satisfaction of a social obligation and not a pleasure against social obligations. And I can’t even have any hatred for the bourgeoisie now, because today in the country I live in, everyone is bourgeois.”
Pasolini, condemned to a kind of irremediable innocence. As a master (first a schoolmaster, then a famous artist), but a defamed master, he is in a place incomprehensible even to himself: for him, two groups of bodies tangled by history, forces of life and forces of death, go through the crucifying ordeal of their imaginary clinch.
1. Roland Barthes, “Sade-Pasolini,” Le Monde, June 16, 1976.
2. Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, in The Drunken Boat and Other Writings, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: New York Review Books, 2022), 93.
3. In Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Éléments pour une analyse du fascisme, vol. 2 (Paris: 10/18, 1976), 141.