Technocratic Utopia: The Mattei Affair

In the immediate postwar period, Enrico Mattei helmed an unprecedented attempt by a state-owned company (ENI [Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi], of which Mattei was founder and plenipotentiary) to unsettle the oligopoly of the global oil cartel, the so-called Seven Sisters: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Texaco, Esso, Socony, SoCal, Gulf Oil, and Royal Dutch Shell. Under Mattei, ENI strongly advocated for abandoning the predatory practices of old and establishing a more equitable business relationship between oil-producing and oil-consuming countries. The film documents the origin and subsequent unfolding of this strategy in a meticulous account of events: Mattei’s appointment in 1945 as chief liquidator of the fascist oil agency AGIP, which he refused to liquidate and instead transformed into ENI; his early exploits in Northern Italy, where he located vast deposits of methane gas; the rapid expansion of ENI’s economic and political interests on a global scale, toward North Africa (Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria), Sudan, Somalia, and Iran; the tensions with the Seven Sisters oil cartel, who saw in the Italian newcomer a suddenly dangerous competitor capable of upsetting the geopolitical balance; and finally Mattei’s death in a mysterious plane crash in Bascapé, near Milan, on October 24, 1962.

The economic and political implications of the relation between Mattei’s individual arc and the larger system of the global oil market constitute the fundamental object of inquiry of Rosi’s film. The concrete terms of this relation, however, remain nebulous. As formal inquiries and newspaper investigations multiply, so do rumors and ambiguities. As one of the journalists investigating the network of interests and influences around Mattei puts it in the film, “We have the impression of putting our hands on something concrete, that then suddenly vanishes.” The hard facts of Mattei’s biography are known, and the film duly chronicles them: his participation in the partisan struggle, his political sympathies for the Christian Democrats’ left current, his strong-minded temperament, his unorthodox methods. What remains somewhat abstract—what vanishes—is the totality of the economic and political system in which Mattei operated.

The ambition to bestow concreteness on such elusive yet overpowering abstractions is the driving desire of the genre of the Italian film-inchiesta (film inquiry). The genre, for which The Mattei Affair can serve as a paradigmatic example, is defined by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, there is the historic, factual dimension the film aims to illuminate through its investigative approach, proposing plausible hypotheses about its most obscure developments. On the other hand, as a corollary derived from the factual aspect, there is the attempted outlining of a larger picture, a totality of interconnected occurrences, actors, and interests that emerges in the background, and that in turn reframes the individual affair as the fragment of a much vaster network of institutional and corporate strategies and competing powers.6 In this sense, one could argue that Rosi’s primary concern is with representation. How does one seize and put into form the immense and elusive networks that envelop reality as we know it? To borrow Fredric Jameson’s widely influential concept, it is certainly possible to argue that The Mattei Affair attempts a cognitive mapping of the postwar global oil market. The film tries to capture aesthetically the interpenetration of neocolonial practices and financial machinations that make up a transitional phase in the history of capital.7

Focusing on the Hollywood paranoia thriller of the 1970s in his landmark essay “Totality as Conspiracy,” Jameson argues that conspiracy is to be understood as one such form of cognitive mapping—or, at the very least, as the signal of a desire to map totality, for this attempt proves inadequate, as the totality that the films wish to capture remains ultimately out of grasp.8 This is to be regarded, however, not as the individual shortcoming of the film but rather as the structural limit imposed on representation by the vastness and complexity of the object to be represented. In this sense, the paranoia thriller offers the example of a failure to map that is nonetheless revelatory. The motif of conspiracy predominant in those films works precisely as a lesser form of cognitive mapping, its inadequacy a means of representation of the global system of financial capitalism pointing simultaneously to a desire to map that the films register and to the unmappability inherent in the object itself that the films can put into relief only negatively.

The conspiratorial theme is also central in Rosi’s film inquiries, particularly in The Mattei Affair. In the film, it is intimated that Mattei died at the hand of a conspiracy orchestrated by the Seven Sisters, who were concerned by their competitor’s plan to establish ENI’s presence in the newly independent Algeria and build a direct oil pipeline to Sicily. Yet the way in which conspiracy is presented in the film prompts us to ask whether the interpretive paradigm of cognitive mapping deployed to analyze the Hollywood paranoia thriller also offers an adequate framework in this case. While the thematic and stylistic affinities between The Mattei Affair and its American counterparts are evident, there seems to be something that Jameson’s conceptualization of conspiracy, centered as it is on the problematic of representation, does not seem to be able to account for, and that is the ghostly presence of the film’s protagonist himself, Enrico Mattei. Jameson accounts for characters in paranoia thrillers primarily as Greimasian actants; their agency (or lack thereof) vis-à-vis the conspiratorial network is determined by the structural position they occupy in the narrative. Unbeknownst to the characters themselves, this actantial position often shifts in the course of the film, thus transforming a protagonist’s role from heroic seeker of truth to unwitting tool in the hands of the conspiracy. The Mattei Affair adopts a different approach. Rather than reorganizing actantial positions, the film subverts narrative linearity by supplementing it with the spectral surplus embodied by its protagonist.

The film opens with a fatal plane crash, then unfolds as a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards that cut back and forth from three distinct time lines: 1962 (Mattei’s death and his aftermath), 1948–62 (the rise of ENI), and 1972 (Rosi’s investigation into Mattei for his film, set in the present day). As the present disintegrates across three different time lines, Mattei’s presence also becomes tenuous, spectral. The film opens with his demise, so he is cast from the beginning as a revenant (“a specter is always a revenant . . . it begins by coming back”9) who installs a dimension of time out of joint, a certain blurring of the distinction between what is present and what is not. This spectrality effect, to borrow Derrida’s formulation, pervades the film. More than simply represented, Mattei is evoked after death by journalistic investigations, memories of other characters, old TV interviews, newspaper articles, pictures, and, of course, Volonté’s characteristically mimetic performance. But how does the film’s conjuration of Mattei’s ghost relate to the other conjuration—namely, the conspiracy in which, to paraphrase the Manifesto, “all the powers” of the global oil market “have joined into a holy hunt against the specter”?

The connection, Derrida observes, is in the word itself—the French conjuration—which “has the good fortune to put to work and to produce, without any possible reappropriation, a forever errant surplus value.”10 This surplus value, ghostly in its own right, is produced by the word’s two distinct and opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means “conjuration,” a conspiracy sealed by an oath, and also the magical evocation of a spirit; on the other hand, it means “conjurement,” which in white magic is an exorcism aimed at conjuring the malevolent spirit away. A spectral effect is thus already inscribed in conjuration, as it is also in the etymology of “conspiracy,” where the Latin word conspirare (literally, “to breathe together”) has the same root as spiritus (spirit, ghost).

This ambivalent spectral effect of conspiracy captured in the French conjuration—to conjure a ghost and to conjure it away—seems to offer the possibility for a conceptualization of conspiracy that is alternative to Jameson’s. What if conspiracies could not be separated from the specters they evoke because, on a structural level, the very existence of a conspiracy depended on a ghostly surplus? What is at stake in the shift from Jameson’s “totality as conspiracy” to totality as spectral conjuration is a different conception of totality itself, as well as the way cinema seizes on this totality. If we look at conspiracy as conjuration, then the question of totality shifts away from the Jamesonian problematic of representation and instead reorients itself toward the question of ontological consistency. In order to attain such consistency, any hegemonic totality—imagined in the form of conspiracy—must rely on some form of exclusion or repression of one of its elements, which then returns in the form of the specter. The impossibility of totalization, then, is not simply ascribable to the vastness and complexity of the object the film tries to represent, as is the case in Jameson. Rather, the form of the conspiracy as spectral conjuration itself points to the totality’s immanent incompleteness. In The Mattei Affair, totality as conjuration is not a zero-sum game; in order for the totality to present itself in the form of conspiracy, a spectral remainder must be produced. This specter is what we might call the symptom of a totality that is constitutively not-all. “Haunting,” writes Derrida, “belongs to the structure of every hegemony.”11 The figure of Mattei as a specter arises precisely as a reaction to the hegemonic practices of the cartel, as what is structurally excluded from the global harvesting and capitalization of natural resources returns as a force bent on transforming the status quo. Mattei himself publicly pointed out that it was the monopolistic agreement between the Seven Sisters grounded in their vertical organization (total control over the oil trade from extraction to refinement to distribution) that “has provoked and is provoking a reaction of new forces interested in breaking the system.”12

This articulation of a structural situation (the global oil market, dominated by the Seven Sisters) with a force born within it and bent on transforming it (Mattei’s ENI) delimits the field of subjectivation of the figure of the specter in the film. As the antagonistic surplus of the strategies of the cartel, the specter of Mattei marks a point of internal contradiction within the structure of the global oil market, one that—through the subjective torsion represented by ENI’s political project—simultaneously opens up the possibility of a transformation of the status quo. In this sense, Mattei’s deliberate attempt at a reconfiguration of the geopolitical situation indicates a subjective effort and creativity that, however embryonic or opportunistic, we may indeed qualify as utopian. Cast as the patriotic defender of the country’s independence (Rosi repeatedly reminds the spectator of Mattei’s involvement in the Resistance), Mattei is a synecdoche for the state itself as on the one hand the last line of defense against the mounting tide of globalizing economic interests, and on the other the agent of a possible reorganization of the geopolitical relations between oil-producing and oil-consuming countries.

Of course, Mattei was no anticolonial guerrillero. As the CEO of a state-owned energy company, he was bent on pursuing Italy’s economic interests. Under his leadership, however, those interests repeatedly aligned with those of anticolonial forces (the FLN in Algeria in particular). On the planetary stage of the Cold War, characterized by the appearance of unprecedented forms of extrastate influence and neocolonial practices, Mattei’s spectral figure is subjectivized by the film into the leader of a state-driven national resistance to forms of imperialism old and new, and as a force able to single-handedly reshape the precarious Cold War equilibrium.13

To be sure, the political limitations of the vision Rosi attributes to Mattei remain evident; they have been aptly summarized by Goffredo Fofi, who calls the film a “technocratic dream.”14 We could further qualify this “dream” as a return to a simpler situation where economic interests could be mapped onto the spatially delimited and politically defined entity of the nation-state (and a certain idea of the common good for its citizens) against the unmappable and rapacious voracity of the global oil cartel. The subjectivation of Mattei as Italy’s savior thus points back to the question of mapping, but seen obliquely from the perspective of the specter. In a situation in which the increasing complexity of the global oil market makes any attempt at a mapping unrealistic, the state is summoned to provide a more reassuring fantasy of mappability in which agents, beneficiaries, and the framework of their interactions are more readily identifiable.

The Mattei Affair, then, looks at totality from this inherently partial figural perspective. The specter functions as a reminder that there is no supposedly objective depiction of totality, for the coherence of any such depiction is guaranteed by the foreclosure of some kernel of subjective antagonism—in this case, Mattei’s fight against the oligopoly of the Seven Sisters. First conjured and then conjured away by the oil cartel and its network of allies, the specter of ENI’s antagonism is the surplus that threatens the existence of the structure; yet, at the same time, the specter allows the structure to find a new internal consistency precisely in the act of violently repressing this antagonism (Mattei’s assassination). In turn, it is the persistence of this ghostly surplus after Mattei’s demise that makes the outline of the larger conspiratorial networks of the cartel visible. The question raised by a reading of totality as conjuration is thus not one of incommensurability between individual perception and the complexity of a totality, as is the case in Jameson. Rather, it prompts a revisited conceptualization of totality itself. As the gap inscribed at the heart of totality, the specter constitutes at the same time the limit and the condition of possibility of cognitive mapping. The specter is not a distortion that needs to be corrected in order for an objective totality to emerge. Instead, it is in this ghostly distortion itself, and in the subjectivation of antagonism to which it points, that we can glimpse the logic governing the totality as not-all.

Rules of the Game: Illustrious Corpses

If The Mattei Affair shows an attempt to subjectivize the specter in order to elevate the Italian nation-state and its publicly owned energy company to the level of anti-imperialist bulwarks, then Illustrious Corpses adopts a considerably more ambivalent stance, with the state taking on the ominous shape of an authoritarian and conspiracy-driven machine. Adapted from a 1971 novel by Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger (Il contesto), the film is set in an unnamed, “wholly fictional country; a country where ideas were obsolete, where principles—still proclaimed and acclaimed—were ridiculed, where political ideologies were reduced to pure denominations in the roleplay of power, where only power for power’s sake mattered.”15 The protagonist, Amerigo Rogas (Lino Ventura), is a police detective tasked with investigating a string of assassinations of high-profile judges as the country is roiled by a wave of far-left street protests and strikes. The investigation focuses on Cres, a pharmacist unjustly convicted for the attempted murder of his wife. His motive seems obvious: the murdered judges were all part of the panel that passed his sentence. However, as the investigation progresses and the bodies pile up, Rogas begins to suspect that Cres’s vendetta is a cover-up to justify an authoritarian coup by the upper echelon of the government, the judiciary, and the armed forces. Rogas, determined to expose these machinations, meets with the left-wing opposition leader, but they are both murdered by an unknown killer. As the media pin the responsibility of the deaths on Rogas and tanks are revving their engines in the streets, the leadership of the left-wing party (informed by Rogas about the imminent coup) opts to remain silent in fear of precipitating events.

The influence of the Hollywood paranoia thriller in Illustrious Corpses is even more evident than in The Mattei Affair, as Rosi adopts many of the conventions of the genre outlined by Jameson: a deliberately convoluted narrative; a protagonist whose righteous desire to expose the scheme leads him to become an unwitting tool in the hands of the conspiracy itself; and, finally, a certain fetishistic fascination with surveillance and communication technology as the allegorical stand-in for an invisible and all-pervasive network of power. The historical reference for this depiction of sprawling conspiracies and authoritarian undercurrents is obviously the Italian political conjuncture of the 1970s, which saw the institution of a permanent state of exception that lasted for over a decade and came to be known as strategia della tensione. This “strategy of tension” combined state-sponsored terroristic attacks and brutal police repression of radical movements in order to stoke fears about an imminent communist takeover and push public opinion toward support of increasingly authoritarian measures.16

This occurred in the international context of a vast, multiyear economic crisis, what Robert Brenner has famously named the long downturn. An increase in competition and decline in profitability in the global manufacturing sector dating back to the mid-1960s forced national governments in industrialized countries to adopt extreme measures, including unilateral monetary policies, such as Nixon’s cancellation of direct convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971.17 The global economy’s downward spiral, compounded by the oil crisis of 1973, resulted in the stock market crash of 1973–74. In this situation of economic recession and heightened political uncertainty, the U.S. empire undertook decisive measures to curb the threat of a communist rise to power in allied countries. In Italy, this took the form of military and intelligence support for the creation of fail-safe authoritarian plans that would install a junta in the presence of the threat of a communist overthrow.18

No longer the embodiment of an external enemy encroaching on the country’s autonomy as it was in The Mattei Affair, the conspiracy in Illustrious Corpses is now nested within the state, an overt reference to the current events of the time. However, it is important to note that Illustrious Corpses is not, nor wishes to be, a factual account of the historical occurrences that punctuated the years of the strategy of tension. It should rather be read as a tract on the conspiratorial logic that defines the rule of law in the so-called democratic state when the state finds itself under attack from within.19 At the center of these labyrinthine machinations we again find a specter—that of Cres, the elusive pharmacist turned killer. If Mattei’s spectrality was suggested by the disjointed temporality of the film, then Cres’s is openly avowed. Of the three suspects that Rogas investigates, Cres is the only one who remains faceless. During a visit to his residence, Rogas notices a number of photographs with Cres’s silhouette cut out (Figure 19).

While Sciascia describes the atmosphere of the house as haunting (“there lingered something sinister, as though in a convent, or a prison”20), the image of the cut-out pictures is entirely Rosi’s, testifying to the specific significance that the figure of the specter bears in the film.

As was the case with Mattei, Cres’s spectrality marks the uncanny return of an originally foreclosed element. The victim of a plot organized by his wife to take his money (a conspiracy within a conspiracy), Cres is sentenced to jail in the absence of definitive evidence, only to then return as vengeful ghost. He stands as the embodiment of a miscarriage of justice, whose foreclosure reveals the fundamentally divided nature of the rule of law. On the one hand is the avowed pursuit of justice by way of impartial procedures; on the other is the unspoken principle of the absolute unimpeachability of the judiciary, embodied by the supreme court president, Riches (Max von Sydow). In one scene, Riches explains to Rogas that there is no such thing as a miscarriage of justice, for “a judge may have doubts, he may question himself . . . but at the very moment he delivers his sentence, no more. At that moment, justice is done.” Regardless of any shortcomings of the individual officiant or the investigative process, the institutionalized performance of a ritual establishes a reality that possesses its own autonomy from factual considerations or objections.

The postulate of the infallibility of the court conjures a figure like Cres who is (factually) innocent and (legally) guilty at once. His predicament is exemplified by the ancient Roman army practice of decimation evoked by Riches. In this disciplinary measure, designed to punish and discourage mutiny, one randomly selected soldier out of every ten is executed. Riches reasons that times of social and political turmoil warrant such extreme recourses, whereby a punishment meted out unjustly yet legally serves the purposes of the raison d’état. Cres’s predicament is thus presented not as an accidental occurrence but as the necessary by-product of the inner logic of the state. The foundation of state power thus reveals its obscene underside. The arbitrary interpellation of innocents as criminals as a form of self-perpetuation of the state points to the authoritarian excess that is intrinsic to democratic power. As Žižek writes, “The law can only sustain its authority if subjects hear in it the echo of the obscene unconditional self-assertion. . . . Laws do not really bind me, I can do whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide so.”21

As the film progresses, however, another dimension of state power becomes apparent—what we might call its proper political dimension, coinciding with the shift in the film setting from the periphery to the capital. This dimension emerges by way of a further displacement of the specter. After the murder of a judge unrelated to Cres’s case, the president of the republic addresses the nation, framing the murders as a “revolt against order, authority, and the law” whose responsibility lies with the far-left groups, guilty of instigating impressionable individuals to challenge state authority. Previously cast as the return of the repressed in the authoritarian logic of judicial power, the specter is now weaponized politically. The president’s speech announces the state’s project to make itself into a political subject—that is, an antagonistic (and in this case reactionary) force against the perceived threat of an imminent revolution.

Similar to The Mattei Affair, in Illustrious Corpses, the conspiracy functions as a conjuration. In the film, state agents participate in both evocation and exorcism of the ghost. Yet one cannot fail to notice that the development of the conspiracy in the film proceeds in a remarkably fortuitous manner, as many turning points in the advancement of the conspiratorial plans are either determined by chance or are left utterly unexplained. One such example is Rogas’s unplanned visit to a party hosted by foreign billionaire Pattos (Alexandre Mnouchkine). Chasing someone he suspects could be Cres, Rogas ends up at the party but loses track of him. Rogas is then greeted by Pattos and the Minister of Safety (Fernando Rey) and invited to stay and enjoy himself. The gathering is the capital’s who’s who of the political, economic, and intellectual elite; in attendance are high-ranking functionaries of the state, industrialists, renowned leftist writers, and even one of the leaders of the so-called radical groups.

In a conversation that mirrors Riches’s lecture on the infallibility of the law, the Minister of Safety educates Rogas on what he calls “the game”: everybody participates in it, playing a role, whether they are aware of it or not. Rogas does too. His impromptu appearance at the party, the Minister explains, will be taken by some of the players as a calculated move to instill the doubt that the police are surveilling them. This game, in which the players are asked to constantly guess the opponent’s (or ally’s) moves, reminds us of the other game evoked in the film’s title: cadavre exquis, the surrealist pastime in which participants are asked to collectively assemble a text or a picture by each adding one element, but without knowing what the previous contributions are. The picture of the conspiracy painted in Illustrious Corpses greatly resembles such assemblages. In the film, the schemers are presented as loosely linked to one another and often lacking a proper cognitive mapping of the general situation—cadavre exquis as statecraft. The party scene suggests a fluid and contradictory situation in which the interests represented by the guests are shown as sometimes colluding and sometimes conflicting, but always in the context of a struggle in which the ultimate motives and aims of the counterparts remain obscure. The game’s participants are forced to operate in a regime of heightened contingency and reciprocal blindness, taking advantage of unanticipated eventualities such as Cres’s murderous spree and Rogas’s unplanned visit to the party.

This reactive opportunism of the conspirators, while certainly presupposing a general authoritarian design, nonetheless suggests the lack of an all-encompassing master plan. Conspiracies are often invoked to provide an identifiable intentionality to otherwise obscure and anonymous processes (what Jacques Lacan would call the Other of the Other). The dimension of the game in Illustrious Corpses, however, complicates such a proposition, for the players operate in the absence of an ultimate transcendental guarantee of their actions. In light of this aspect, we can now better grasp the import of Riches’s position discussed earlier. Riches and the Minister—the judiciary and the executive—are two sides of the same coin. The judge’s belief in the existence of the supreme infallibility of the law (when passing a sentence, the judge embodies justice itself) is the obverse of the Minister’s awareness of its absence (everybody is playing a game). The spatial organization of the film speaks precisely to this duality between the somberness of quasi-religious state rituals and the playful theatricality of the game. The places where the liturgy of state power takes place (the supreme court, the ministry, the police archives, the prison) are captured by Rosi with wide-angle lenses, lending a staged quality to the action (Figure 20). The characters never seem to dominate the scene. Often dwarfed by the grandiosity of baroque architecture and brutalist buildings, they simply perform in these environments like puppets against a backdrop that had been set for them by someone else.22

The point here is not (solely) that democracy structurally bears within itself the seed of authoritarianism. Rather, it is that the field of authoritarianism in democracy is precisely defined by these two seemingly contradictory coordinates: the law as absolute necessity and the game of statecraft in its radical opportunism. Most importantly, the two are intertwined in a dialectical relationship. In the vertiginous feedback loop that echoes throughout the film, it is the fiction of a transcendental guarantee of state rule created by the judiciary that allows for the relative free play of conspiratorial plotting. When the rule of law comes under attack by the spectral by-product (Cres) of its own inflexible logic of infallibility, the state intervenes by weaponizing the specter for its own authoritarian objectives while simultaneously revealing the incompleteness of the totality it purports to represent.

What is deliberately left obscure in Illustrious Corpses is the link between this Januslike manifestation of the strategy of tension and the global economic and geopolitical framework in which it occurs. In his famous “Article on the Fireflies” (originally titled “The Void of Power in Italy”), Pier Paolo Pasolini seized on the elusiveness of this invisible global hand and the general unawareness on the part of the Italian establishment of the epochal shift that occurred concomitantly to the economic miracle. The Christian Democrats, writes Pasolini, have been deluding themselves about their leadership role and are now mere “death masks” covering up a real power void.23 “Of this ‘real power,’” writes Pasolini, “we have images that are abstract and ultimately apocalyptic: we cannot picture what ‘forms’ it would assume by substituting itself to the slaves [servi, the DC] who took it for a mere ‘technical’ modernization.”24 In Illustrious Corpses, while the “slaves” play their game, a new master announces its presence not only in the relatively marginal figure of the billionaire Pattos but also, and more ominously, in the ubiquitous white Mercedes-Benz—and its unknown occupant—that materializes at all key narrative junctures in the film. (The car is a ghostly presence in its own right, with its Swiss plates unsubtly adumbrating the stateless nature of the interests it represents.)

We thus arrive at the last twist in the intricate labyrinth that is Illustrious Corpses: from the unequivocal belief in the Other of the Other (Riches’s religious mindset), to the acknowledgment of its inexistence (the Minister’s emphasis on the gamelike nature of statecraft), to the vague insinuation that there in fact might be a grander plan in place, one orchestrated by the mysterious forces of global capital. As we have seen, the split between the former two conspiratorial paradigms (Riches’s and the Minister’s) maps out the division at the heart of the law itself: the fact that law is not-all, and that a surplus of arbitrary violence is needed to disavow—and simultaneously reaffirm—this lack. The latter paradigm (global capital’s invisible hand) functions as a solution to the problem posed by the other two. Not only does it fill the historical void behind the death masks of the judge and the Minister, but it also bridges the structural gap nested at the heart of the state itself. The hint to a global conspiracy enveloping the other two local plots offers a way—however unresolved or merely suggested—to overcome the division that haunts the state, thus providing it with a modicum of internal consistency.

The specter cuts through the three paradigms obliquely, as both a condition of possibility of the interlocking conspiracies and the index of a totality that is not-all. Created by the judiciary as collateral damage, fortuitously weaponized by the executive, and finally reabsorbed into a vast global conspiracy, the specter is the pivot around which the subjectivation of the state revolves. This subjectivation occurs dialectically; the state evokes the specter as the externalization of its own internal split, only to then attempt to exorcise it, attaining subjective consistency in the process. The specter then becomes the vanishing mediator that allows the disparate, if not outright contradictory, spirits of the state to come together in one large authoritarian design.

It is significant that in the context of the globalizing world of the 1970s, it is only in the presence of some form of extrastate influence that the state can attain its own subjectivation, as though it could only find its own coherent self-image outside of itself—a perspective shared by both Pasolini and Rosi that has to do with Italy’s peculiar geopolitical position in the postwar period. In both The Mattei Affair and Illustrious Corpses, the key factor seems to be the distance that separates the center of power from the peripheries, and the attendant freedom to maneuver that political and economic actors may have within such liminal spaces. In The Mattei Affair, the limited control that U.S. companies had over Italian geological resources after World War II permitted Mattei’s efforts toward the country’s energy independence, and with them the rise of a credible threat to the oligopoly of the Seven Sisters. Inversely, Illustrious Corpses depicts a situation in which Italy’s geopolitical positioning as a frontier—part of the U.S. empire, yet home to the largest Communist Party in Europe and close enough to the Soviet bloc to be susceptible to their influence—warranted the planning and deployment of military countermeasures aimed at containing and neutralizing the communist threat. The important shift between the two films is in the diverging conceptions of the state in a similar context of U.S. imperialist interference. Subjected to immense pressures by the global geopolitical situation, the state, once imagined as protector of national interests, reveals itself in the economic recession and political instability of the 1970s as a repressive apparatus completely enmeshed in the networks of influence that are coming into being in a globalizing world.

Dividing the Law: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

With Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Elio Petri opens up the logic of state authority to a more abstract examination. While obviously redolent of the historical context of the strategy of tension, Investigation aims for a proper formalization of the logic of state authority in the form of a general symptomatology that takes as its starting point the figure of the specter. The film revolves around the murder of libertine bourgeois Augusta Terzi (Florinda Bolkan) by her lover, an unnamed police chief in the homicide division (Gian Maria Volonté, referred to by the honorific title Dottore in the original version). Eager to test the limits of his own impunity, the Chief covers his tracks only haphazardly, while the investigation zeroes in on a young anarchist, Antonio Pace (Sergio Tramonti), with whom Augusta was also having an affair. As the Chief is promoted to helm the political division and sets out to prosecute radical leftist groups, a series of flashbacks paints the picture of a perverse relationship between the victim and the murderer in which the Chief’s authority—and, by proxy, his virility—was now revered, now ridiculed by Augusta, who shows a bemused fascination with the Chief’s line of work, prompting her to reenact crime scenes with him for sexual arousal. In the surreal ending, the Chief decides to turn himself in, but he falls asleep and dreams of his colleagues coercing him into the most paradoxical of admissions: a confession of innocence. The film ends with the Chief, now awake, welcoming the same group of colleagues into his apartment in a near-exact replica of his dream.

Plenty of analyses of Investigation to date have focused on the character of the Chief, and for good reason.25 However, the spectral presence of Augusta—murdered in the first scene and turned revenant through the series of flashbacks—has scarcely received the same critical attention. After the murder, Augusta first reappears as a disembodied voice, visiting the Chief in his sleep as the dreamlike reminiscence of their first contact: a phone call in which Augusta introduces herself as an admirer of the Chief’s public persona. From then on, the flashbacks chronicle the progressive trajectory from, at first, a shared fetishistic attachment to violence (the crime scene reenactments) and the superegoical authority of the law (“I love when you question me,” confesses Augusta. “You’re so suspicious, you remind me of my father”), to a contentious affair in which the Chief’s jealousy, mocked by Augusta, reveals his fundamental insecurity.

The stereotypical traits of hypersexualization, sophistication, and elusiveness seem to point to a reading of Augusta as a male fantasy. In the film, these traits are suffused with the stereotypical sociocultural nuances of ’68 counterculture: with her ethnicizing clothing, emancipated sexuality, carnivalesque penchant for masquerade, and ambiguous distaste for authority, Augusta is framed by Petri as an assemblage of the kind of liberties (sexual, political) that the state apparatus helmed by the Chief is designed to repress, thus making her at the same time the good object and the bad object of the Chief’s desire. First, she bolsters his delirium of omnipotence by giving herself over to him; she gleefully plays the victim in the crime scene reenactments, offering herself as the object of the Chief’s voyeurism, amplified by the omnipresent prosthesis of the photo camera. But she also pokes holes in the Chief’s facade of authority and respectability, constantly reminding him—and the spectator—that his power is ultimately nothing but a fiction. In this sense, Augusta performs for the Chief the spectacle of state law itself, whose paradox is that of being inherently split, simultaneously omnipotent and impotent.

The recurrent theme of immaturity in the film shows precisely how these two aspects are linked. “The people are underage,” explains the Chief during his inauguration speech at his new post, and the police, as representatives of the fatherly power of the state, have “the duty to repress” any and all forms of subversion. But the Chief also reveals his own childish inanity when his presumed omnipotence is exposed as a fiction by Augusta and the anarchist Pace. The mask of authoritarianism quickly falls off when Augusta mocks the Chief’s virility and Pace refuses to be intimidated by his interrogation tactics. From fascist, hypermasculine enforcer of the status quo, Volonté masterfully switches registers to portray a sniveling man-child prone to tantrums. Like Lulù in The Working Class Goes to Heaven discussed in chapter 2, the Chief oscillates between the position of the pervert (the tool in the hands of the law as Other) and that of the hysteric, who is tortured by a fundamental uncertainty as to why the law assigned him to his position of power (“Why am I what the Other says that I am?”).

The doubt instilled by Augusta’s mockery is precisely what triggers the Chief’s probing of the foundations of his authority. Being “above suspicion,” then, means being beyond the doubt of the hysteric. To dispel this doubt, the Chief must test the boundaries of his own power, and in doing so, he reveals the split nature of law itself: “eternal, sculpted in time” for the pervert, as the Chief says in his inauguration speech; elusive and enigmatic for the hysteric, who must launch an “investigation” on suspicion itself. The repeated return of Augusta, however, prevents the film from solving the problem of this internal fissure in terms of a simple separation between autonomous dimensions. As is often the case in Petri, there is a surplus that haunts the split, an enjoyment that does not let itself be fully captured by the side of the pervert or the hysteric but rather creeps into the gap between the two. Augusta frames this surplus for the Chief by acting as a fantasma—in Italian, a word meaning both “fantasy” and “ghost.” The fantasy of Augusta as the rebellious sexual object infatuated with authority frames the desire of a law that can enjoy its omnipotence only by finding itself powerless—or, put differently, a law that can only enjoy in the gap between its omnipotence and its impotence.26

It is the specter of Augusta, with her insistent questioning of the Chief’s lawman persona, who hystericizes the perverse Chief, thus opening up for him the possibility to find enjoyment in the compulsive probing of his own unaccountability. This possibility to find enjoyment, it should be noted, seems precluded to all the other characters in the film; the other police officers are perverts without hystericization, having power but experiencing hardly a doubt about their symbolic mandate, whereas the citizens (Augusta’s gay ex-husband, Pace’s anarchist comrade, the plumber played by Salvo Randone) are hysterics without perversion, interpellated by the state (they are all subjected to interrogations) and forced into the agonizing exercise of guessing what the Other wants from them.

This surplus enjoyment, figured by the specter, is what makes state authority not-all. The totality of the state is structurally incomplete because it is tied to enjoyment. In Illustrious Corpses, the state attained its subjectification into an authoritarian agent thanks to the specter acting as a vanishing mediator in a concrete, historically situated geopolitical context. In Investigation, Petri provides a more general formalization of the logic of state power by starting from the police and charting the dynamics of the excessive pleasure that haunts the state’s repressive apparatuses. Not-all and split from within as in Rosi, state authority in Investigation is held together—and simultaneously kept in its divided form—by this surplus enjoyment. This is the paradox of state authority as Petri sees it: there can be no enjoyment without the division at the heart of state law, just as there can be no unitary notion of state law without the enjoyment that splits it apart. The hysteric and the pervert are two sides of the same cop.

In Petri, as opposed to Rosi, the conspiracy functions as a deus ex machina, manifesting itself at the end to operate a compulsory dehystericization of the Chief, a cure for what he calls the “occupational hazard” of being a cop—namely, the questioning of one’s own mandated power. The final apparition of Augusta reveals her as conjurée in that she participates in the conspiracy to cover up her own murder by providing the most liberating of absolutions, the one bestowed by the victim: “You killed a worthless person,” she tells the Chief in his dream; “somebody else would have killed me. Sooner or later, I was destined to die that way. Do what they tell you. Think of your colleagues. Think of your career.” Augusta’s last words seal her fantasmatic destiny. Just like the postulate of the infallibility of the law explained by Riches in Illustrious Corpses was made possible by the specter of Cres as the founding exception, the ultimate unaccountability of law enforcement is sanctioned by Augusta, the specter of the victim conjured by the police officer who absolves her murderer and exhorts him to return to his assigned place in the symbolic order.

This question of enjoyment haunting state law is hinted at in another film by Petri, Property Is No Longer a Theft where a police detective (Orazio Orlandi) confesses that what he likes most about his job is the liberty to arrest whomever he wants, because “to arrest someone is the most beautiful thing” (arrestare è bellissimo). In Property, however, the scope of Petri’s symptomatology enlarges considerably to encompass not only the question of state authority but also that of capital’s rule over the individual and, most significantly, of the mutually reinforcing relationship between the two.