Notes
Introduction
Italian political cinema of the 1960s and 1970s constitutes one of the most understudied topics in the field of film studies, and recent work has by and large relinquished the ambition to engage in a comprehensive theorization of the relationship between politics and cinema. For a pioneering attempt to articulate a wide-ranging argument about the ontology of political cinema, see Ciriaco Tiso, Cinema Poetico-Politico (Rome: Partisan, 1971). More recently, Maurizio Grande has attempted to revive the discussion around the concept of political cinema starting from a specific set of Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s. See Maurizio Grande, Eros e politica. Sul cinema di Bellocchio Ferreri Petri Bertolucci P. e V. Taviani (Siena: Protagon 1995), esp. 14–44. For contemporary studies of Italian political cinema in the long ’68, see Luana Ciavola, Revolutionary Desire in Italian Cinema (Kibworth, U.K.: Troubador Italian Studies, 2011); and Alberto Tovaglieri, La dirompente illusione: Il cinema italiano e il Sessantotto, 1965–1980 (Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino, 2014). For an exhaustive overview of the contemporary situation of Italian political cinema, see Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva, eds., Italian Political Cinema: Public Life, Imaginary, and Identity in Contemporary Italian Film (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016).
“Today, the most politically advanced cinema is very rarely a cinema on politics. In fact, the films that deal with politics fill up the filmographies of mediocre and mystifying directors, dozens of Vancinis, Petris, Lizzanis, Pontecorvos, Puccinis, etc.” Enzo Ungari, “Nosferatu ’70: Una sinfonia del disordine,” Cinema&Film, no. 7–8 (1969), reprinted in Barricate di carta. “Cinema&Film,” “Ombre rosse,” due riviste intorno al ’68, ed. Gianni Volpi, Alfredo Rossi, and Jacopo Chessa (Milan: Mimesis 2013), 115.
Lorenzo Pellizzari, “Rosi, Petri, Maselli e altri: Il ‘vero’ e ‘falso’ politico,” in Storia del cinema: Italia anni settanta e le nuove cinematografie, ed. Adelio Ferrero (Padua: Marsilio 1981), 84.
Claudio Bisoni, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Turin: Lindau, 2011), 15.
This shared gesture has also the specific effect of normalizing Petri’s cinema as either not political enough or only tangentially political. One of the purposes of this book is precisely to dispel such a misunderstanding. There is hardly anything average about Petri’s filmmaking, and the central position his films occupy in most of the following chapters will, I hope, attest to that.
This perspective resonates with Alain Badiou’s interrogation of the paradoxes of cinema as a “mass art”—that is, as both art and nonart, aristocratic and democratic, cinema presents itself as inherently impure. See Alain Badiou, “On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem,” in Cinema, trans. Susan Spitzer (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2013), 233–41.
The perceived complicity of cinema politico with the status quo was summed up under the disparaging label of “Rosi-Petrism” (rosipetrismo), with “generalized Petri-clasty” (Petriclastia generalizzata) as its attendant and opposite reflex. The terms appear, respectively, in Michele Guerra, “Impegni improrogabili: Le forme ‘politiche’ del cinema italiano anni settanta,” in Anni ’70: L’arte dell’impegno. I nuovi orizzonti culturali, ideologici e sociali dell’arte italiana, ed. Cristina Casero and Elena di Raddo (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), 181; and Callisto Cosulich, “Tavola rotonda. Cinema politico, film politologico?,” Vita e Pensiero, no. 3–4 (1973): 22, qtd. in Guerra, “Impegni improrogabili,” 181. For a scathing critique of rosipetrismo, see the work of Goffredo Fofi, esp. Il cinema italiano: Servi e padroni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971).
Goffredo Fofi, Capire con il cinema: 200 film prima e dopo il ’68 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), 264, qtd. and transl. in Evan Calder Williams, “The Fog of Class War: Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven Four Decades On,” Film Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2013): 50–59, 56.
Jacques Derrida, “Finis,” in Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 20.
George Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 89.
Nicole Brenez, De la figure en général et du corps en particulier. L’invention figurative au cinéma (Brussels: De Boeck, 1998), 13.
Badiou cites Brecht’s play Life of Galileo (performed 1943) and Orson Welles’s film Mr. Arkadin (1955) as examples of this logic. In both instances, the regime of character creation is superseded by “a sort of fragmentation and constant delocalization” that gives rise to “something else”: a figure. Alain Badiou, “Thinking the Emergence of the Event,” interview with Emmanuel Burdeau and François Ramone, in Badiou, Cinema, 105–28, 128.
See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), 9–76, 23. For a critical assessment of the role of the figure in Benjamin’s thought, see Carlo Salzani, Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008).
1. “A Dance of Figures”
Derrida, “Finis,” 15.
This is the position eloquently argued by Badiou, who sees art (including cinema, with its own singular status as the “plus-one” of the arts) and politics as separate and independent truth procedures that, along with science and love, operate according to their own set of practical and conceptual schemata. One could go as far as claiming that for Badiou political cinema per se does not exist. There is politics, and there is cinema. No hierarchy is posited between them, nor is excluded the possibility of intersections, but they remain autonomous with respect to each other. On politics, see Alain Badiou, “Politics as Truth Procedure,” in Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verso, 2012), 141–52. On art, see Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). Among the most influential theorizations that reject this reciprocal autonomy, Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of the correspondence between aesthetics and politics stands out. For Rancière, both domains are concerned with the “distribution of the sensible” of a given historical moment—that is, the perceived organization of social hierarchies among different groups and the forms of inclusion and exclusion that enforce it. In the case of the “aesthetic regime of arts” that began at the end of the eighteenth century and still defines the distribution of the sensible of our present moment, we witness the overthrow of hitherto enforced artistic conventions and hierarchies in the name of a radical egalitarianism of all art forms. Rancière considers this egalitarian impulse as analogous to militant political action against established social hierarchies, which also aims at reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible. In an interview, Rancière argues that in spite of theorizations to the contrary (like Badiou’s), aesthetics and politics “intermix in any case: politics has its aesthetics, and aesthetics has its politics. But there is no formula for an appropriate correlation. It is the state of politics that decides that Dix’s paintings in the 1920s, populist films by Renoir, Duvivier or Carné in the 1930s, or films by Cimino and Scorsese in the 1980s appear to harbor a political critique or appear, on the contrary, to be suited to an apolitical outlook on the irreducible chaos of human affairs or the picturesque poetry of social differences.” Jacques Rancière, “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière in Interview with Gabriel Rockhill,” in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. and with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), 49–66, 62. The politics of art is therefore a matter of interpretation, which is entirely determined by the state of politics at any given point in history. Rancière’s ultimately historicist account solves the problem of political cinema by taking the relation between the two terms as given, then locating the guarantee of this relation in neither art nor politics but rather in history.
Sarah Kofman, “Beyond Aporia?,” trans. David Macey, in Post-structuralist Classics, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1988), 7–44, 10.
Kofman, “Beyond Aporia?,” 23.
Alberto Farassino, “Comunicazione di Cinegramma,” in “1968–1972: Esperienze di cinema militante,” ed. Faliero Rosati, Bianco e Nero, no. 7–8 (1973): 111–14, 112. Farassino further observes that “The notion of political cinema is one of those objects, built not through theoretical work, but through an analogical synthesis that brings about a whole host of misunderstandings” (112).
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” (1969), in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 752–59, 755.
The essay, together with the subsequent work published by the Cahiers in the 1970s, also had a crucial impact on anglophone film theory. The journal Screen in particular welcomed Comolli and Narboni’s militant and theoretical impetus. Screen published translations of a number of articles from French (including “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”), while theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Elizabeth Cowie, Stephen Heath, and Colin MacCabe further solidified an approach to cinema that was equally indebted to Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 754.
Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 755.
Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 755.
These two modes of approaching political cinema have, of course, proper historical names and illustrious genealogies. The militant discourse as a project was born with the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, then renewed by the leftist film criticism of the late 1960s and 1970s (in journals like Cahiers and Positif in France and Ombre rosse in Italy) and by radical filmmakers the world over. The second discourse has its roots in the intellectual tradition of cultural studies, from its inception with Stuart Hall in Birmingham in the 1960s to its global turn in the 1980s and 1990s.
Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 757.
Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 757.
Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 757, 757, 758.
Auerbach, “Figura,” 9–76, 12. The nuances become more precise from author to author, in the literary and scholarly uses of the word. “Dream image” or “ghost” (Lucretius), “constellation” (Manilius), “hidden allusion” (Quintilian), and “presage” (Tertullian) are just a few of the examples listed by Auerbach.
See Brenez, De la figure; and Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico.
Brenez, De la figure, 44.
Brenez, De la figure, 55.
The figure as an operation of figurative undoing has been studied within a somewhat heretical intellectual lineage that connects, in addition to the aforementioned Brenez and Didi-Huberman, the likes of Georges Bataille, Jean-François Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze.
Jacques Aumont, À quoi pensent les films? (Paris: Séguier, 1996), 156.
Aumont, À quoi pensent, 170.
Of course, a figure still relies on representational elements. To be recognized as a worker or a housewife, a figure must display a modicum of features that are characteristically associated with them. This, however, is a necessary but insufficient condition. A figure solely defined by its recognizable traits would not be a figure at all but something more akin to a type in the Lukácsian sense. For György Lukács, the typical weds the concrete existence of an individual, with all its real-life details, to the evocation of the universal dynamics of an individual’s historical situation. Yet contrary to the figure, the Lukácsian type still obeys to a logic of representation: as the mediator between individuality and universality, the type expresses history. For an overview of the concept of the type in Lukács, see Béla Királyfalvi, The Aesthetics of György Lukács (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 78–83.
Brenez, De la figure, 84; Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 12.
Deleuze associates this temptation with what he calls the “cliché”: “One can only fight against the cliché with much ruse, perseverance and prudence: it is a task perpetually renewed with every painting, with every moment of every painting. It is the way of the Figure.” Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 79.
Kaja Silverman, “Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Novel 18, no. 1 (1984): 5–28, 15. See also Auerbach, “Figura.”
Ernst Bloch, “The Problem of Expressionism Once Again,” in Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 251–53.
Bloch, “Problem of Expressionism,” 251 (emphasis added).
Bloch, “Problem of Expressionism,” 252.
Ernst Bloch, “Foundation of Phenomenology,” in Heritage of Our Times, 275–6.
Alain Badiou calls these two processes, respectively, subjectivization and subjective process. See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. and with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 56.
This figure of crisis has important continuities, as well as differences, with what Luka Arsenjuk has defined as the figure in crisis in the artistic and theoretical work of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. We both understand the figure as critical in Didi-Huberman’s sense, but we emphasize different aspects. For Arsenjuk, the figure in crisis points to the self-division and becoming dialectical of forms of movement in Eisenstein; in this book, the figure of crisis is invented by cinema to give body to the holes and hollow spaces of history. See Luka Arsenjuk, Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 23–64.
When cinema tries to foreclose this nonrelation, as we have seen, it lapses back into an operation of mere representation of political content. But the dangers of this foreclosure are just as significant for politics. The example of the worker is in this sense paradigmatic. While cinema invents the figure of the worker to make legible a certain historical situation of crisis, a politics of the figure of the worker would disavow the unavoidable complexity of collective processes of subjectivation under the pretense of a straightforward identification with a type. The temptation of a politics of figures, then, is that of reifying the process of political subjectivation into the static form of a figure to be held up as an identitarian fetish. For a theorization of the politics of the figure of the worker that avoids these pitfalls, see Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, trans. Gila Walker (London: Seagull, 2015).
Bloch, “Problem of Expressionism,” 252.
Two essential historical accounts of collective movements in the Italian long ’68 are Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990); and Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, trans. Lisa Erdberg, with a foreword by Joan Wallach Scott (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). For a contemporary reassessment of the vicissitudes of political militancy in that period, see Giovanni De Luna, Le ragioni un decennio: 1969–1979. Militanza, violenza, sconfitta, memoria (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2011).
For an overview of the period from the perspective of labor history, see Stefano Musso, Storia del lavoro in Italia: Dall’unità ad oggi (Venice: Marsilio, 2002), 229–66.
See Antonio Negri, “Proletarians and the State: Toward a Discussion of Workers’ Autonomy and the Historic Compromise,” in Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, trans. and ed. Timothy S. Murphy, trans. Arianna Bove, Ed Emery, Timothy S. Murphy, and Francesca Novello (London: Verso, 2005), 118–79; and Sergio Bologna, “The Tribe of Moles,” trans. Red Notes, in Autonomia: Post-political Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 36–61. For a militant account of the political experiment of the Autonomia and its ongoing influence, see Marcello Tarì, Il ghiaccio era sottile: Per una storia dell’Autonomia (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2012).
Paolo Virno, interview in Gli Operaisti. Autobiografie di cattivi maestri, ed. Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2005), 308–25, 312.
Auerbach, “Figura,” 17.
2. The Worker
Despite being arguably more attentive than other national cinemas to the plight of the working class, Italian cinema has by and large steered clear of factories, so much so that its rare depictions remain etched in the national and, dare we say, global imaginary: the shop floor where a Simone Weil–esque Ingrid Bergman replaces a worker in Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 (Europa ’51, 1952); the steel mill in Eduardo De Filippo’s Neapolitans in Milan (Napoletani a Milano, 1953); the glimpses of the Alfa Romeo auto plant in Milan where Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960) ends; the images of the assembly line that bookend Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (1962); the late-nineteenth century textile factory in Turin in Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer (I compagni, 1963), to name but a few well-known examples. For an overview of the cinematic explorations of the factory in Italian cinema, see Carlo Carotti, Alla ricerca del paradiso: L’operaio nel cinema italiano, 1945–1990 (Genoa: Graphos, 1992); and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Italian Cinema and the Working Class,” International Labor and Working Class History 59 (2001): 36–51.
For an overview of the historical sequence that culminated in the Biennio Rosso, see Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano. I. Da Bordiga a Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 3–122; and Gwyn A. Williams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils, and the Origins of Italian Communism, 1911–1921 (London: Pluto Press, 1975).
In two essays from 1971 and 1973, within the context of a discussion of forms of working-class organization in the twentieth century, Antonio Negri posits a similar distinction between these different types of the worker and their attendant party formations. See Antonio Negri, “Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organization,” 1–50, 11–20, and “Workers’ Party against Work,” 51–117, 94–100, both in Murphy, Books for Burning.
See Bloch, “Problem of Expressionism.”
The anecdote is told in Alfredo Rossi, Elio Petri e il cinema politico italiano: La piazza carnevalizzata (Milan: Mimesis, 2015), 110–11.
See Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 241–74.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book 10: Anxiety, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 116.
Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 33.
Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 33.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 1:271.
The irruption in the film of these two gestures of refusal of labor (speech and riot) within the context of class struggle in Italy in the 1960s provides further evidence of the transition from the older typology of the worker to the new one. While the previous type of labor was elevated to a defining element for the worker’s identity and a reason for pride, the new worker rejects labor altogether as the primary tool of capitalist oppression over everyday life. The political gesture of refusal of work has a long history in Italian postwar radical thought and praxis, from the wildcat strikes of the early 1960s to Mario Tronti’s theorizations a few years later, from the autonomist struggles of the 1970s to the ongoing relevance of the concept for contemporary postworkerist thinkers such as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Tiziana Terranova, and Bifo Berardi.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 127. Badiou here paraphrases Lacan’s famous dictum that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book 17: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 116 (translation modified).
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), § 151, pp. 238–44, 239.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 168.
Marx, Capital, 1:128.
Williams, “Fog of Class War.”
Negri first introduced the concept in 1975 in “Proletarians and the State: Toward a Discussion of Workers’ Autonomy and the Historic Compromise,” in Murphy, Books for Burning, 118–79. For Negri’s assessment of his theorization of the “social worker” some thirty years later, see the interview in Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale. Intervista sull’operaismo, ed. Paolo Pozzi and Roberta Tommasini (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2007).
See, e.g., Linea di montaggio (Assembly line; Ansano Giannarelli, 1972), where images of the assembly line at the FIAT Mirafiori plant in Turin are coupled with a voice-over reciting passages from Capital.
Lazarus, Anthropology, 26.
The three moles can be read as a nod to the geographical shape of Sicily, known in ancient times as Trinacria, from the Greek tri- (three) and akra (capes).
In particular, she draws on Pietro Germi’s Sicilian diptych, Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana, 1961) and Seduced and Abandoned (Sedotta e abbandonata, 1964), as premier examples of these uneasy anachronies.
For a discussion of the trope of revenge in cinema and its relation to the logic of debt, see Jean Ma, “Circuitous Action: Revenge Cinema,” Criticism 57, no. 1 (2015): 47–70.
The English word normally used to translate the Italian padrone is “owner.” Padrone, however, is endowed with a larger semantic range. It denotes not just ownership or possession but also the extension of a certain rule and control over the worker. It therefore contains in itself also “boss” and even “master.” As an example, the “master” (Herr) in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of the Spirit is usually translated in Italian as padrone. For this reason, and mindful of the role the word padrone played in the history of leftist struggles in Italy, we will keep the original Italian.
It is obviously not by accident that the Italian national anthem, “Fratelli d’Italia” (Brothers of Italy), plays in the background whenever Ferro’s characters appear on screen.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 62.
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 47.
Lazzarato, Making, 45–46.
Sicily, where the unfinished project of Italian modernity casts the sharpest chiaroscuro, seems to offer a particularly fitting stage for these theatrics, and a long lineage of Sicilian literature (from Luigi Pirandello to Vitaliano Brancati, from Leonardo Sciascia to the more recent work of Giorgio Vasta) dealing with a certain illegibility of the structures of power attests to nothing if not that.
Shot between 1971 and 1972, Trevico-Turin was produced by a small company controlled by the PCI, Unitelefilm, which provided a small crew and organized a limited release in a few selected theaters.
Goffredo Fofi, “Qualche film,” Quaderni piacentini, no. 50 (1973): 197–208.
Lino Micciché, “Trevico-Torino: Viaggio nel Fiat-Nam di Ettore Scola,” in Cinema italiano degli anni ’70: Cronache 1969–1979 (Venice: Marsilio, 1980), 162–64.
Alain Badiou, “The Factory as Event Site,” Prelom 8 (2006): 171–76.
Marx, Capital, 1:388.
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 29–46.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 5.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 2.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1.
Gilles Deleuze, seminar on cinema at the Université Paris 8 Saint-Denis, lecture of March 2, 1982, La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne (www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze, accessed June 26, 2018), transcribed by Jerôme Letourneur, my translation.
The spatial dialectic presented in the film between what is present (the abandoned infrastructures) and what is absent (the factory) points to a certain limitation in Deleuze’s conceptualization of the any-space-whatever as an empty place of pure potentiality, for this potentiality is always determined by what that space excludes or hides.
Unknown author, review of Trevico-Turin, typewritten document, Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico, Rome (in French, my translation).
Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume 1 (New York: Verso, 2014), 71.
See Mario Tronti, “A New Type of Political Experiment: Lenin in England,” in Workers and Capital, trans. David Broder (New York: Verso, 2019), 65–72.
For a critical approach to the figure of the victim, see Daniele Giglioli, Critica della vittima. Un esperimento con l’etica (Rome: Nottetempo, 2014).
3. The Housewife
For a wide-ranging overview of the history of feminist thought on social reproduction, see Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labor, and Social Reproduction (London: Pluto, 2020). A highly influential assessment of the Marxist legacy within feminism can be found in Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013).
See Claudia Jones, “We Seek Full Equality of Women” (1949), Viewpoint Magazine, February 21, 2015, viewpointmag.com; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983); “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” Combahee River Collective, 1977, combaheerivercollective.weebly.com (accessed November 24, 2020); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970); and Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
For a detailed historical and conceptual overview of Wages for Housework written by a former member, see Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77 (London: Pluto Press, 2018). On the legacy of operaismo in Wages for Housework, see the interviews with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Alisa Dal Re in Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero, Gli operaisti, 121–31 and 144–54.
Silvia Federici, “Wages against Housework,” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, Calif.: P. M. Press, 2012), 15–22, 17.
Federici, “Wages against Housework,” 19.
“The left’s proposal for the social struggle was simply the mechanical extension and projection of the factory struggle: the male worker continued to be its central figure. The women’s liberation movement considers the social level to be first and foremost the home, and thus views the figure of the woman as central to social subversion.” Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Preface to the Italian Edition of Women and the Subversion of the Community (March 1972),” in Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader, ed. Camille Barbagallo, trans. Richard Braude (Oakland, Calif.: P. M. Press, 2019), 13–16, 16.
Silvia Federici, “Marx and Feminism,” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism, Critique 16, no. 2 (2018), www.triple-c.at.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, interview in the afterword of Toupin, Wages for Housework, 220–40, 222.
Cesare Casarino, “Images for Housework: On the Time of Domestic Labor in Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of the Cinema,” differences 28, no. 3 (2017): 67–92, 74.
See Giuliana Minghelli, “Haunted Frames: History and Landscape in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione,” Italica 85, no. 2–3 (2008): 173–96.
Federici, “Wages against Housework,” 16.
This displacement of colonialism—a motif that returns in Ferreri’s subsequent work—seems to speak to the specificity of the Italian colonial experience as something that can only be represented by something else (an apostolate, an exploration), thus evoking the country’s largely unresolved relation to its own history of imperialist violence.
Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, no. 3–4 (1982): 74–87, 81.
Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (New York: Verso, 2015), 146–47.
“What does our oppression within the family do to us women? It produces a tendency to small-mindedness, petty jealousy, irrational emotionality and random violence, dependency, competitive selfishness and possessiveness, passivity, a lack of vision and conservatism. These qualities . . . are the result of the woman’s objective conditions within the family—itself embedded in a sexist society.” Mitchell, Woman’s Estate, 162.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,” in Barbagallo, Women and the Subversion of the Community, 17–49, 38.
Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 134.
Weeks defines the practice of demand as an attempt at cognitive mapping. See Problem with Work, 130–31.
Weeks, Problem with Work, 131.
Weeks, Problem with Work, 134.
Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox, Counterplanning from the Kitchen (New York: New York Wages for Housework Committee and Falling Wall Press, 1977), 1–15, 6. Curiously, this quote has been excised from the recent reprint of the essay in Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 28–40.
Casarino, “Images for Housework,” 78–79.
Casarino, “Images for Housework,” 78
Casarino, “Images for Housework,” 85–86.
Domietta Torlasco, “Philosophy in the Kitchen,” World Picture Journal, no. 11 (2016), worldpicturejournal.com.
Cesare Casarino, “Images for Housework,” 89n1.
Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor, and Capital, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Hilary Creek (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1995), 165 (original entirely in italics).
“With the advent of capitalism, all labor power was ‘freed.’ Unlike any preceding mode, the new mode of production formally established a different production relation with men from that which it established with women. The sexual division of labor developed to such a degree that the work subject of reproduction was separated off from that of production; the two processes became separated by value. The man—as the primary work-subject within production, was obliged to enter the waged-work relation. The woman—as the primary work-subject within reproduction, was obliged to enter the non-waged-work relation.” Fortunati, Arcane of Reproduction, 30–31.
Fortunati, Arcane of Reproduction, 108.
Federici and Cox, Counterplanning, 35.
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 202.
This humiliating exchange between Antonietta and Emanuele reminds us of Juliet Mitchell’s acute observation that the housewife-mother’s “work is private and because it is private, and for no other reason, it is unsupervised. This is the source of that complacent ‘your time’s your own, you are your own boss’ mystifying build-up that housewives are given.” Mitchell, Woman’s Estate, 161.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 127.
This position has been variously articulated by, among others, Pier Paolo Pasolini, who sees in the film an example of the “free indirect point-of-view shot” (“The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett [Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2005], 167–86, 178–80); Sandro Bernardi, who emphasizes a certain indiscernibility of subjectivity and objectivity in the film (Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano [Venice: Marsilio, 2002], 180–88); and Giorgio Tinazzi (Michelangelo Antonioni [Milan: Il Castoro Cinema, 1995], 102–7).
Angela Dalle Vacche highlights Antonioni’s eclectic painterly influences, citing Art Informel (Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier), futurism, Giorgio De Chirico, Piet Mondrian, and Mario Sironi as some of the visual inspirations for Red Desert. See Angela Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 43–80.
Louis Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 157–66, 163, 160.
Althusser, “Cremonini,” 158.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 164.
This is the Stirnerian position demolished by Marx with Engels in The German Ideology (1846). Without wishing to retrace the complex Marxist debate around the subject, it will suffice to say that the central issue, what Alberto Toscano aptly calls “the open secret of real abstraction,” is not that the two opposites—concreteness and abstraction—present themselves ambiguously, so that one can’t definitively decide which is which. Rather, the problem is that they are one and the same, two sides of the same coin. See Alberto Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism 20, no. 2 (2008): 273–87.
Althusser, “Cremonini,” 164.
This is the crux of the conversation between Corrado and Giuliana on the oil rig, where the former—as capital personified—explains that he must chase lucrative investments wherever they may present themselves, while the latter confesses that she cannot imagine leaving everything behind.
This is why, in light of Red Desert, one should question the omnipresence of the term “alienation” in discussions of Antonioni’s work of the early 1960s. In Marx, particularly in his early writings, alienation presupposes the existence of an essence of the human to be reappropriated with the demise of the capitalist mode of production. On the contrary, Red Desert invites us to reinterpret the existential agony of the bourgeoisie through a decidedly more antihumanist lens, one privileging the concept of abstraction to that of alienation.
Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto, 2017), 68–93, 82.
In a surprising choice, the English translators render the original French Image-pulsion with “impulse-image,” all but obscuring its crucial psychoanalytical reference to the drive. We will maintain the modified translation (“drive” for pulsion) throughout our discussion.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 128.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 123.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 129.
Daniele Rugo, “Marco Ferreri: The Task of Cinema and the End of the World,” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 1, no. 2 (2013): 129–41, 138.
Alberto Scandola, Marco Ferreri (Milan: Il Castoro Cinema, 2003), 76. Similar to Red Desert, this is achieved mainly through the use of color. Glauco’s white shirt rhymes with the living room walls and the immaculate room divider, while his apron echoes the red and white decoration of the gun. See Scandola, Marco Ferreri, 75–76.
Althusser, “Cremonini,” 164.
Tithi Bhattacharya, “Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” introduction to Social Reproduction Theory, 1–20, 11.
Marx, Capital, 1:719.
Scandola, Marco Ferreri, 78.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 126.
Althusser, “Cremonini,” 165. The Marxian echo is apparent: “The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-laborer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.” Marx, Capital, 1:719.
4. The Youth
Among the exceptions, let us mention at least Mauro Bolognini’s Chronicle of a Homicide (Imputazione di omicidio per uno studente, 1972), Gianni Amelio’s Blow to the Heart (Colpire al cuore, 1982), and the last episode of the anthology film Love and Anger (Amore e rabbia, 1969), Let’s Discuss, Let’s Discuss (Discutiamo, Discutiamo) by Marco Bellocchio. For a discussion of the latter as emblematic of the politics of 1968, see Mauro Resmini, “Obscurity, Anthologized: Enjoyment and Non-relation in Love and Anger (1969),” in 1968 and Global Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 199–215.
Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro 1968–1977 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015), 51.
Antonio Negri, “Proletarians and State: Toward a Discussion of Workers’ Autonomy and the Historic Compromise,” in Murphy, Books for Burning, 118–79, 126 (translation modified).
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, with a preface by Michel Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 1–50.
Elvio Fachinelli, “Il desiderio dissidente,” in Al cuore delle cose: Scritti politici (1967–1989) (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2016), 29–35, 31–32.
See “Uno scambio epistolare Pasolini-Bellocchio,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 2:2800–15, originally in I pugni in tasca: Un film di Marco Bellocchio, ed. Giacomo Gambetti (Milan: Garzanti, 1967), 9–24. The letters were signed by Bellocchio, but it was later revealed that the director, who was twenty-six at the time, thought he was too inexperienced to respond to an established intellectual like Pasolini. So Grazia Cherchi, cofounder and codirector of the journal Quaderni piacentini, came to the rescue and penned the responses on his behalf. See Antonio Costa, I pugni in tasca (Turin: Lindau, 2007), 58 and 71n6. For a detailed discussion of the epistolary exchange, see Silvia De Laude, “‘Cinema di prosa’ e ‘cinema di poesia,’ tertium datur: Su Pier Paolo Pasolini e I pugni in tasca di Marco Bellocchio,” Engramma 172 (2020), engramma.it.
“Uno scambio epistolare Pasolini-Bellocchio,” 2801–2 and 2805. Cherchi also makes a similar point in “L’età verde,” Giovane critica, no. 12 (1966): 9–12.
Italo Calvino, Rinascita, no. 15 (April 9, 1966), qtd. in Costa, I pugni in tasca, 170.
“Uno scambio epistolare Pasolini-Bellocchio,” 2805.
Grande, Eros e politica, 47–48.
The faint echoes of Sophocles in the context of the Italian long ’68 are markedly different from the ones that reverberate through Germany in the second half of the 1970s. Thanks in particular to the collective film Germany in Autumn (Alexander Kluge et al., 1978), the event of the death of the Red Army faction original members in the Stammheim prison in 1976–77 conjures the all-too-palpable specters of Antigone and Creon as emblems of the state’s violent repression of dissent. On Antigone’s overdetermination in the so-called German Autumn, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn, and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (New York: Verso, 1999), 267–302.
Interview with Liliana Cavani included in the 2014 Blu-ray release of the film by Raro Video.
In interviews, Cavani has repeatedly corroborated this interpretation. For a selection of her interventions on the topic, see Ciriaco Tiso, Liliana Cavani (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), 66–71.
The polymorphic nature of the self in Moretti’s oeuvre has been extensively discussed in scholarship, especially in relation to the perceived narcissism of Moretti’s persona. See, e.g., Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, The Cinema of Nanni Moretti (New York: Wallflower, 2004).
Sergio Benvenuto, What Are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2018), e-book.
Jacques Lacan, Television, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Dennis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson (New York: Norton, 1990), 23.
Lacan, Television, 30.
Lacan, Television, 30.
Colette Soler, Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Routledge, 2016), 81.
Soler, Lacanian Affects, 82.
Éric Laurent, “From Saying to Doing in the Clinic of Drug Addiction and Alcoholism,” Almanac of Psychoanalysis 1 (1998): 129–40, 139.
Jacques Lacan, “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), 722–25, 722.
In the film’s climactic scene, Michela overdoses at the feet of the monument commemorating Pasolini’s murder in Ostia in 1975. It is, first and foremost, an homage to an artist whose influence is palpable in Toxic Love. But it is also a highly symbolic choice, implicitly connecting the tragedy of drug addiction in the 1980s to a larger history of the scandalous spectacle of young bodies in Italy, of which Pasolini was inarguably the most acute and most passionate critic. Moretti would visit that same monument twenty years later, riding his Vespa in Dear Diary. In these pilgrimages, one can perhaps discern the silhouette of a kinship between Pasolini, Moretti, and Caligari: a shared desire to diagnose the political potentialities and contradictions of a historical moment, which, in different ways, the figure of the youth crystallizes for all three of them.
It is worth noting that in the 1970s, the criminalization of left-wing political activists was one of the most widely used and effective tactics adopted by the repressive apparatuses of the state. Although no explicit political motives are attached to the bank robber’s actions, it would not be a stretch to imagine Monicelli relying on the implicit state-sponsored association “radical activist = criminal” to throw into relief the opposition between the two faces of the youth in the film, with the series law-abiding/middle-class/apolitical on the side of Mario and criminal/proletarian/radical on the side of the bank robber.
The most spectacular display of this nascent sentiment will be the famous Marcia dei quarantamila. On October 14, 1980, in Turin, forty thousand white-collar workers from FIAT took to the streets to protest the ongoing blue-collar strike at the Mirafiori plant. Secretly organized and promoted by FIAT’s upper management, the silent procession provided a funereal response to the tumultuous protests of the previous decade and pushed the unions toward a deal that favored the ownership, thus marking the end of an era of working-class struggle at Mirafiori.
5. The Saint
For a critical engagement with the role of the youth in Pasolini’s oeuvre, see Simona Bondavalli, Fictions of Youth: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Adolescence, Fascisms (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015). For a specific focus on the youth in Pasolini’s cinema, see John David Rhodes, “Watchable Bodies: Salò’s Young Non-actors,” Screen 53, no. 4 (2012): 453–58.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Repudiation of the Trilogy of Life,” in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2005), xvii–xx, xvii.
Pasolini, “Repudiation,” xix. Patrick Rumble has offered a compelling reading of the “Abiura” as an ironic recantation in the vein of Boccaccio and Chaucer. However, the sheer existence of a film like Salò—and the unfinished project of a trilogy of death—invites us to take Pasolini’s repudiation more seriously than not. See Patrick Rumble, Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 82–99.
Pasolini, “Repudiation,” xviii. In his opinion pieces from the early 1970s for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, Pasolini had already discussed what he saw as the alarming signs of petty bourgeois conformism in youth counterculture. See esp. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il ‘discorso’ dei capelli,” “Acculturazione e acculturazione,” “Studio sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia,” and “Limitatezza della storia e immensità del mondo contadino” in Scritti Corsari, collected in Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 271–77, 290–93, 307–12, and 319–24.
Pasolini, “Repudiation,” xviii.
See, e.g., Stefania Benini, Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Pasolini e l’interrogazione del sacro, ed. Angela Felice and Gian Paolo Gri (Venice: Marsilio, 2013); Giuseppe Conti Calabrese, Pasolini e il sacro (Milan: Jaca Book, 1994); and Tomaso Subini, La necessità di morire: Il cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini e il sacro (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2008).
The other two obvious instances of the depiction of sainthood in Italian cinema would be Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (Francesco giullare di Dio, 1950) and Liliana Cavani’s 1966 made-for-television film Francesco d’Assisi (then remade into Francesco for the big screen in 1989). Pasolini had high praise for The Flowers, but he considered Cavani’s attempt at depicting sainthood on screen to be a failure. For a discussion of Pasolini’s depiction of Franciscanism in his cinema in comparison to Rossellini’s and Cavani’s, together with Pasolini’s assessment of them, see Benini, Pasolini, 147–86.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Elogio della barbarie, nostalgia del sacro,” in Il sogno del centauro. Incontri con Jean Duflot, collected in Siti and De Laude, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, 1480–90, 1483.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teorema (Milan: Garzanti, 2016), 18.
Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 198–213.
Pasolini, Teorema, 18.
It is important to underscore that the members of the family seduce the Visitor, not the other way around. Fabio Vighi has argued that the figure of the Visitor can be identified with the Lacanian objet a (the object-cause of desire) and that the characters, confronted with the unsettling proximity of this object, can only resort to sex to placate their anxiety. This argument resonates with Pasolini’s own skepticism in “Repudiation”: far from a liberating cure-all for the ailments of society, sex would then be nothing more than a reactive defense mechanism to keep anxiety at bay. See Fabio Vighi, Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 191–92.
See, e.g., Serafino Murri, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Milan: Il Castoro Cinema, 2003), 97–104.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Teorema: Come leggere nel modo giusto questo libro,” in Teorema, vi.
Pasolini was planning to direct a film in which Saint Paul’s story was to be transposed to World War II. Paul would have been a French fascist hunter of partisans who receives an illumination on his way to Franco’s Spain (with Barcelona as a stand-in for Damascus) and as a result joins the resistance. Pasolini wrote an outline for a screenplay, but the project never found financial backing and was ultimately abandoned by the director. See Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saint Paul: A Screenplay (London: Verso, 2014). For a systematic discussion of the Pauline legacy in Pasolini, see Benini, Pasolini, 187–220; Francesca Parmeggiani, “Pasolini e la parola sacra: Il progetto del ‘San Paolo,’” Italica 73, no. 2 (1996): 195–214; and Tomaso Subini, “La caduta impossibile: San Paolo secondo Pasolini,” in Il dilettoso monte. Raccolta di saggi di filologia e tradizione classica, ed. Massimo Gioseffi (Milan: LED, 2004), 227–74. My gratitude goes to Tomaso Subini for sharing a copy of his essay with me.
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2, 66.
See Badiou, Saint Paul, 23.
See Badiou, Saint Paul, 74–85; and Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), esp. 83–84.
Pasolini, Teorema, 106.
Pasolini, Teorema, 172.
Lacan, Television, 15–16.
See Jacques-Alain Miller, “A Reading of Some Details in Television in Dialogue with the Audience,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field 4, no. 1–2 (1990).
Cesare Casarino, “Pasolini in the Desert,” Angelaki 9, no. 8 (2004): 97–102, 101–2.
Benini, Pasolini, 200.
Lacan, Television, 16 (translation modified).
Casarino has underlined the inconsequentiality of the Father’s gesture: “Clearly, collective ownership of the means of production is no sufficient guarantee against the extraction of surplus value—and against its attendant and constitutive forms of exploitation—if the process of production itself does not undergo radical transformations.” Casarino, “Pasolini in the Desert,” 100.
Lacan, Television, 16.
Lacan, Television, 16.
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre 22. RSI, 1974–5, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, seminar of February 18, 1975, Ornicar?, no. 4 (1975): 101–6, 106.
See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book 23: The Sinthome, 1975–1976 (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
Lacan, Television, 16.
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (London: Picador, 2003), 241.
It would perhaps not be too far-fetched to suggest that this new regime of accounting of enjoyment might share some traits with Foucault’s concept of biopower, especially in relation to the shift from sovereign power and the “right of life and death” over its subjects to biopower as consisting in “making live and letting die.” Foucault, in “Society Must Be Defended,” reminds us that in ancient times, “death was the moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign” (248). In Pigsty, this certainly holds true for the death of the cannibal. But in the era of the Klotzs and the Herdhitzes, death becomes a secretive moment, “when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats . . . into his own privacy” (248). Is this not a fitting description of Julian’s final demise, which the film refrains from showing? In this new regime, Foucault explains, “power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death.” This is exactly what Herdhitze does in the final scene, when he chooses to disregard the news of Julian’s suicide out of strategic calculation. Herdhitze, the Nazi officer turned industrialist, exercises figuratively the power of “making live and letting die” that he had wielded literally during the Holocaust.
Lacan, Television, 16.
For Pasolini, Saint Paul “represents both the knot and the suture between the sacred dimension and the foundation of an institution. On the one hand, at the moment he ascends to the Third Heaven and issues the sacred word, Paul acts as the initiator of a process that over the long term will dismantle the classical world and its institutions, including slavery. On the other hand, it is also Paul who establishes the Church and its rules, rules that determine its relationship to institutional power.” Benini, Pasolini, 193.
See Lorenzo Chiesa, The Virtual Point of Freedom: Essays on Politics, Aesthetics, and Religion (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 17–29.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Troppa libertà sessuale e si arriva al terrorismo,” in Siti and De Laude, Saggi sulla politica, 237–41, 238, qtd. in Chiesa, Virtual Point of Freedom, 20.
The expression appears in Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, ed. and trans. Norman Maradasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 89. Badiou comments on it in “Thinking the Emergence of the Event,” interview with Emmanuel Burdeau and François Ramone, in Badiou, Cinema, 105–28, 109.
6. The Specter
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), xvii.
Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium of Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 2008), 26–67, 38.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 150.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 74.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 81.
Apart from the geopolitical implications of the oil cartel’s monopolistic practices in The Mattei Affair, other subjects of Rosi’s film inquiries include the ties between politics and real estate speculation in the Italian South (Hands over the City [Le mani sulla città, 1963]) and the inscrutable alliances between the Italian state, foreign powers, and the Mafia (Salvatore Giuliano [1962], Lucky Luciano [1973]). Emmanuel Barot has looked at Rosi’s film inquiries through the lens of Lukácsian realism; see Emmanuel Barot, Camera politica: Dialectique du réalisme dans le cinéma politique et militant (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 57–86.
See Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 347–60.
See Fredric Jameson, “Totality as Conspiracy,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 9–84.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 11.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 49.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 46.
This is a quote from a speech Mattei gave at the Ninth Hydrocarbon Conference in Piacenza in 1960, with many executives of the Seven Sisters attending. See Fulvio Bellini and Alessandro Previdi, L’assassinio di Enrico Mattei (Milan: Flan, 1970), 151.
The outsized influence Mattei had in political matters was observed with a certain apprehension from across the Atlantic, where the Kennedy administration saw the CEO and his primary political backers (DC notables Giovanni Gronchi and Amintore Fanfani) as the initiators of a possible Italian drift within NATO away from the United States and toward neutrality: “The leitmotiv . . . is precisely the intertwining of ENI’s business and Mattei’s foreign policy strategies, which had a considerable impact on the official Italian position—to the point where the United States became concerned that the situation would lead to a crisis of the entire framework of the Atlantic alliance.” Nico Perrone, Obiettivo Mattei: Petrolio, Stati Uniti e politica dell’ENI (Rome: Gamberetti, 1995), 104. This more neutralist stance within NATO became known as neo-Atlantism, a current within the DC that began in 1958 with the second Fanfani government.
Fofi, Capire con il cinema, 261.
Leonardo Sciascia, “Nota,” in Il contesto (Milan: Adelphi, 2006), 113–14, 114.
The character of Cres is somewhat reminiscent of other innocent victims of the machinations of state power like anarchists Pietro Valpreda and Giuseppe Pinelli, both erroneously tied to the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan. The expression “strategy of tension” first appeared in an article on the bombing in the Observer on December 14, 1969.
See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (New York: Verso, 2006).
Long celebrated as a laboratory of radical politics, the Italian 1960s were just as much a testing ground for covert operations orchestrated by the United States. These include Gladio, a clandestine stay-behind operation designed in the early 1950s to repel a possible invasion of Italy by the members of the Warsaw Pact; the Solo Plan, a preemptive military coup planned in 1964 to neutralize the perceived rise of leftist forces in the country; and the attempted coup of 1970 led by former Fascist Navy commander Junio Valerio Borghese, parodied by Mario Monicelli in We Want the Colonels (Vogliamo i colonnelli, 1973). See Mirco Dondi, L’eco del boato: Storia della strategia della tensione 1965–1974 (Bari: Laterza, 2015); and Aldo Giannuli, La strategia della tensione (Milan: Ponte alle Grazie, 2018).
It is worth pointing out that the Italian for “rule of law” (stato di diritto, from the German Rechtsstaat) implies a direct overlap between the law and the state as the institution tasked with defending the rights and liberties of the individual.
Sciascia, Il contesto, 45.
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2017), 378.
See Mary P. Wood, “Revealing the Hidden City: The Cinematic Conspiracy Thriller of the 1970s,” Italianist 23 (2003): 150–62.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “1 Febbraio 1975. L’articolo delle lucciole,” in Siti and De Laude, Saggi sulla politica e la società, 404–11, 409.
Pasolini, “1 Febbraio 1975,” 411.
See, e.g., Bisoni, Indagine su un cittadino; Rossi, Elio Petri, 99–107; and Vito Zagarrio, “La fantasia al potere. Indagine su un film al di sopra di ogni sospetto,” in L’ultima trovata. Trent’anni di cinema senza Elio Petri, ed. Diego Mondella (Bologna: Pendragon, 2012), 59–66.
In the film, this enjoyment attaches itself to specific partial objects. The most conspicuous—and humorous—example is the Chief’s socks. Mocked by Augusta because they are too short, the socks are prominently displayed throughout the film, an inadvertent sign of inadequacy barely concealed by his otherwise impeccable suits.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 6.
Antonio Negri, “The Specter’s Smile,” in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, 12.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844),” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), 279–400, 348–49.
Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 351.
Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 349.
Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 351, emphasis added.
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester, U.K.: Zero, 2014), 46.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 61.
See Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (New York: Verso, 2015).
See Lacan, Seminar, Book 17: Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 177–78.
Karl Marx, “On Proudhon: Letter to J. B. Schweizer,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1969), marxists.org.
Marx, “On Proudhon.”
Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 346.
Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 346.
See Rossi, Elio Petri, 120.
Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 346.
Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, trans. Michael Turits (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13–36, 13 (translation modified).
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (London: Zero, 2014), 18.
David Bernard, Lacan et la honte: De la honte à l’ontologie (Paris: Éditions du Champ lacanien, 2011), 12.
Bernard, Lacan et la honte, 12.
Lacan, Seminar, Book 17: Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 180.
See Soler, Lacanian Affects, 89–98.
Lacan, Seminar, Book 17: Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 182.
Lacan’s mathemes for the master’s discourse and the university discourse appear in Seminar, Book 17: Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 29.
Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2, 26, no. 3 (1999): 19–27, 26.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 88.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 86.
Alain Badiou, “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State,” in Can Politics Be Thought?, trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 111–41, 111. Badiou shares with Derrida the fundamental assumption of the undecidability of a situation (“the condition of decision wherever decision cannot be deduced from an existing body of knowledge as it would be by a calculating machine”; Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, 213–69, 240), yet draws from it diametrically opposed conclusions. Where for Derrida this undecidability imposes a political subjectivity of “waiting without expectation” (249), for Badiou it calls forth a subjectivity of courage: politics resides in the wager to act that the subject makes in the context of an undecidable situation.
Badiou, “Of an Obscure Disaster,” 115.
7. Apocalypse with Figures
The vicissitudes of Salò’s release are well known. It premiered in Paris in 1975 and was then released in Italy in January of the following year, only to disappear suddenly, banned by the authorities until 1978, but de facto never screened publicly again until 1985. Todo Modo, which portrays a grotesque version of Aldo Moro, president of the DC and prime minister at the time, was banned—and all the negative originals burned—after Moro was murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978. The film resurfaced at festivals and in home video formats well into the 2000s. La Grande Bouffe met a relatively more forgiving destiny: it was resoundingly booed at Cannes (where it nonetheless won the critics’ prize), and censors slashed it by over fifteen minutes.
Pasolini’s choice of setting is highly symbolic. Marzabotto was the main theater of one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians orchestrated by the occupying Nazis during the war of liberation, the so-called Massacre of Monte Sole, near Bologna. From September 29 to October 5, 1944, Nazi and Italian collaborationist soldiers summarily executed 1,830 people, including several children.
Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 28. Barthes is referring here to Sade specifically, but his reading can easily be extended to all three films.
Gilles Deleuze links this idea of irreversible decay to the drive-image, which he identifies in the work of Ferreri, among others. For a discussion of the drive-image in another film by Ferreri, Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto, 1969), see chapter 3.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 179.
Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” Diacritics 22, no. 3–4 (1992): 5–18, 9.
Weber, “Taking Exception,” 9 (emphasis in original).
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1.
Benjamin, Origin, 70–71 (translation modified).
Agamben, State of Exception, 56.
Georg [György] Lukács, “On Walter Benjamin,” New Left Review 1 (1978): 83–88, 84.
Benjamin, Origin, 55. It is thus no surprise that Benjamin would encounter many of the features of the Trauerspiel in modern art, especially in the work of Baudelaire.
See Agamben, State of Exception, 16–18. Agamben makes explicit reference to the Decreto Moro (Moro decree) of March 28, 1978, as well as the law decree of December 15, 1979. One could also mention the decree of April 11, 1974 (which significantly lengthened preventive detention), and the decree of May 4, 1977, on the matter of maximum-security prisons for terrorists, the so-called carceri speciali.
Jacques Lacan, “Note on the Father and Universalism,” trans. Russell Grigg, Lacanian Review 3 (2017): 11.
Lacan, “Note on the Father,” 11.
Lacan, “Note on the Father,” 11.
Benjamin, Origin, 66.
Weber, “Taking Exception,” 14.
Barthes, Sade, 167.
Barthes, Sade, 167.
Lacan, Seminar, Book 23: Sinthome, 69.
Serge Daney, “Notes sur Salò,” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 268–69 (1976): 102–3.
Lacan, Seminar, Book 23: Sinthome, 99.
Lacan, Seminar, Book 23: Sinthome, 47.
Weber, “Taking Exception,” 17.
Barthes, Sade, 70.
Elio Petri, “Short Tracts on A ciascuno il suo and Todo Modo,” in Writings on Cinema and Life, ed. Jean A. Gili, trans. Camilla Zamboni and Erika Marina Nadir (New York: Contra Mundum, 2013), 250–58, 257 (translation modified).
Barthes, Sade, 45.
Barthes, Sade, 48.
Barthes, Sade, 72–73.
The President’s inadvertent use of conciliazione (conciliation) may refer to the formal agreement signed by the fascist government and the Vatican in 1929.
Most notably in Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Surveys from Exile, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Verso, 2010), 143–249. For a discussion of the significance of this expression in Marx’s writings, see Mark Neocleous, “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Marx and the Politics of Redemption,” Radical Philosophy 128 (2004), radicalphilosophy.com.
Benjamin, Origin, 69.
Benjamin, Origin, 91.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book 22: RSI, 1974–75, seminar of January 21, 1975, trans. Jacqueline Rose, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, 162–71, 170 (emphasis added).
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book 3: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1997), 132.
Lacan, Seminar, Book 3: Psychoses, 132.
Lacan, Seminar, Book 3: Psychoses, 132.
Chiesa, Virtual Point of Freedom, 30–54, 34.
See, e.g., Fabio Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious (Bristol, U.K.: Intellect, 2006), 94.
Benjamin, Origin, 166.
Benjamin, Origin, 29. For a discussion of the representational character of allegory in Benjamin, see Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 109–22.
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 72.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 138.
Epilogue
Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10.
Ross, May ’68, 5–6.
Evan Calder Williams and Alberto Toscano, “Wrong Place, Right Time: ’68 and the Impasses of Periodization,” Cultural Politics 15, no. 3 (2019): 273–88, 283.
Williams and Toscano trace the first scholarly use of the term to Emilio Reyneri, “Il ‘maggio strisciante’: L’inizio della mobilitazione operaia,” in Lotte operaie e sindacato: Il ciclo 1968–1972 in Italia, ed. Alessandro Pizzorno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978), 49–107.
Cesare Casarino, “Surplus Common: A Preface,” in Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1–40, 13.