Pasolini, à la mesure du réel
About the book
Pulsions pasoliniennes 1 presents itself as a reflection on the contemporary, in a continual struggle of body and speech. Fabrice Bourlez delivers a Deleuzian exercise in critique of psychoanalysis and gender theories through the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Marked by the poet's assassination, by the "untimely" heritage he left us, and by the "inactuality" of his thought and actions, Bourlez rehabilitates Pasolini's voice, which forms the diversity inherent to our species—a disenchanted and repressed diversity.
Approach and themes
Bourlez introduces the idea that Pasolini's work serves to decenter thought through a unique teaching, through forms and places that have no names, expressing themselves only through the paradoxical discovery of their own negation—what he calls the "outside," which is not exteriority but what cannot be analyzed according to theory, what "precedes" in hindsight. After Pasolini's death, his work can be read as a source of the contemporary, forming a logic of contradiction and making it plastic and material so that differences may emerge from this randomness.
Pasolini's critique of modern society
The poet virulently criticized the new culture forming before him—the foundation of our consumer society—which rendered all spheres of society conforming to capitalist ideals of comfort, simplicity, and ease. The Italian language was normalized by television, radio, and newspapers, leaving aside the treasures of its diversity. Bodies no longer had "grace" and no longer lived through singular pleasures. Through his attacks, Pasolini made resonate the urgency to act, without real pause, against "a horrible order founded on possession and destruction."
Connection to French Theory and queer thought
Bourlez references post-feminist theorist Monique Wittig, particularly La Pensée straight, which draws attention to the symbolic order introduced by structuralists—the same ones who later deconstructed it—to identify mechanisms of savage and totalitarian normalization, injustices experienced by differences in society, and submission to the signifier. To escape this murderous rejection, one must disrupt the rules, make them a parody of themselves. However, Bourlez shows that bringing together Pasolini's impulses and the subversive power of the queer movement is not as straightforward as it might seem, as many differences exist between them.
Late works: Salò and Petrolio
Bourlez examines Pasolini's last works—Petrolio (literary) and Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (cinematic)—to trace the wanderings of Pasolinian impulses. In Salò, Pasolini pushes furthest his search for a "language of cinema poetry," based on escaping conventional narration and transposing it to cinema's source: "its primary dreamlike, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary quality." The narration is cruel, direct, incomprehensible, illegible. For Petrolio, the structure is "fragmentary," using other ways to render "something written," a substance without name and illegible. These late works aim at the real and force fiction to submit to it.
Psychoanalysis and Deleuzian perspective
Bourlez complicates the relationship between psychoanalysis and Pasolini. While Pasolini's work is filled with references to Freudian discoveries and dialogue with Lacan, Bourlez warns against any psychologization of his work—it is only poetic. Pasolini claimed reality as his only idol. Bourlez renders the links between psychoanalysis and Pasolinian reality debatable by introducing Deleuze's thought: for the French philosopher, the language of reality is not a language but "a plastic form […] formed semiotically, aesthetically, pragmatically." Pasolini goes against the symbolic, against the law of the Father in language; he embodies the formless, the stigmatized, the body that refuses the domination of the symbolic.
Gender theories and the symbolic order
Bourlez references anthropologist Gayle Rubin and her interpretation of male domination—the only way to destabilize the symbolic order would be to shake it from within, via psychoanalysis itself. A rapprochement between Pasolini's work (where bodies are transformed, language is stripped of meaning, the inconceivable is shown) and gender theories is possible, but under certain conditions. Pasolini condemned communitarianism among sexual minorities, loving only what was outside all hierarchy and rules—hence his development of "free indirect style." However, Pasolini contradicts himself by condemning his entire previous cinematic work at the end of his life, seeing society attack those bodies he believed untouchable and unique. He fights perversion with perversion in Salò, where bodies are dictated from one fascism to another.
Pasolini and queer theory
Bourlez proposes seeing Pasolini not as a precursor of queer theory but as an illuminator of "the direct experience of the magma of reality." Pasolini fabulates family landmarks, deconstructs them through the fall of fathers and their repeated "fiasco." On this subject, Pasolini comes closest to queer theories, through psychoanalysis. His work serves "the revision of the moral, castrating order traditionally associated with the figure of the father in the Oedipus complex." Pasolini diverts traditional Oedipus by striking it with the logic of the real, fragmenting it into multiple versions.
Perversion and language
Bourlez interprets Pasolini's love for things of the world as a praise of perversion—the pervert being one who "fetishizes the object so as not to see lack in the Other." The fetish is a "force of revelation, a promising reinvention of language." It is through language that Pasolini uses his perversion to cause fathers to fail, to distance human achievements from meaning, and to make it an ethics of the drive—a drive that Bourlez calls "Pasolinian."