A Figural Surplus

If there is a kinship between the figures of the saint and the youth analyzed in chapter 4, it finds its most imaginative articulation in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Repeatedly throughout his oeuvre, Pasolini associates the young body to sainthood and the dimension of the sacred. In his cinema alone, the Christlike apotheosis of the protagonists of Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), the depiction of Jesus in The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, 1964), and the divine nature of the Visitor in Teorema (1968) all testify to the recursivity of this figural coupling between the youth and the saint. Perhaps because of its seeming ubiquity, this coupling is often taken as a given, one of many Pasolinian idiosyncrasies whose obvious artistic—and autobiographic—significance overshadows the elusiveness of its exact articulation. To be sure, the youth stands as the primary, openly avowed object of Pasolini’s desire, not only from the standpoint of sexuality but also from artistic and political ones.1 In relation to this centrality of the youth, the saint seems to function as a sort of figural surplus, either in the form of a becoming-saint of the youth or as a separate figure that nonetheless relays back to the youth, putting it into relief. But how are we to understand this surplus? What originates it?

It is well known that Pasolini saw in the youth (in particular the lumpenproletarian youth) a promise of authenticity in a world of vile conformism, an innocence untainted by the malaises of contemporary neocapitalism and simultaneously a reservoir of intractable antagonistic energies that resist co-optation into dominant social structures. However, this redemptive vision is not without its ambivalences, emerging at first in Pasolini’s own thorny relationship to ’68, then detonating dramatically in his famous repudiation of the Trilogy of Life. In this brief introduction to the 1975 Italian edition of the screenplays for The Decameron (Il Decamerone, 1971), The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury, 1972), and The Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte, 1974), the filmmaker famously reconsiders his artistic and political investment in the youth, whose sexualized yet “innocent” body he previously saw as “the last bulwark of reality.”2 In a handful of terse lines, Pasolini comes to terms with his own misconception: “Sexual liberalization, rather than bringing lightness and happiness to youths and boys, has made them unhappy, closed, and consequently stupidly presumptuous and aggressive.”3 The ambiguity of the figure of the youth in the long ’68 discussed in chapter 4 is cast into stark relief. Manipulated by the “false tolerance” of the establishment, the pursuit of a free enjoyment reveals the rebellious youth of the long ’68 as a symptomatic by-product of the system, rather than its antagonist.4

The omnipresence of the youth in Pasolini’s work is therefore haunted by a fantasy of radical emancipation of which the young body would be both a site and an agent—a fantasy whose misguided, even reactionary, nature became apparent to Pasolini only after having traversed it in the form of the unapologetic vitalism of the Trilogy of Life. Indeed, one could argue that what drives the proliferation of young bodies in Pasolini’s works is, in fact, the very limitation of the youth’s political horizon; the quest for an accurate representation of the elusive radical subjectivity of the youth reinscribes this limitation at every turn. This is what propels Pasolini’s pursuit forward, shifting focus to other young bodies precisely to disavow the fact that the pitfalls of the youth as a subject of emancipation were there from the start, ingrained into the very fabric of this figure: “The youths and the boys of the Roman proletariat—the ones I have projected in the old and resistant Naples, and later in the poor countries of the Third World—if now they are human garbage, it means that potentially they were such also then.”5

It is within the context of Pasolini’s conflicted relationship to the youth that the appearance of the figure of the saint must be understood. Precisely because of its absolute centrality in Pasolini’s life and works, the youth as object of desire can only be represented directly at the price of a certain loss, in the form of a defusing of this figure’s political potential. To seize this potential, the mediation of a third term is needed. While the youth maintains its centrality, he becomes supplemented by a figural surplus. In a way, it is precisely when Pasolini is not depicting the youth as a revolutionary subject per se but rather is displacing its political dynamism across other figures that he can truly capture the scope (and limitations) of this figure’s political dimension. This happens most prominently with the figure of the saint, whose presence in Teorema and Pigsty we will discuss in this chapter. But, as we will see in chapter 7, this figural surplus also marks Pasolini’s last completed film, Salò, where the withering political horizon of the youth emerges precisely in contrast with the rise of another figure: the tyrant.

It is therefore crucial to formulate the separateness of the figure of the saint in Pasolini as something that must be maintained not in opposition to the youth but rather precisely due to the youth’s centrality in Pasolini’s work. No doubt this seems like a deliberately perverse reading of an author widely associated with the political significance of the youth. But if so, this perverse reading is warranted by a perversion inherent in the work of Pasolini himself, in the psychoanalytical sense of a detour away from the object of desire in order to seize it where it is not, displaced and disguised as something else. This reading also offers one way to understand Pasolini’s own uneasiness with respect to the event of 1968, since it allows us to grasp this uneasiness as an attempt to find some distance from an object of desire that is otherwise too close for comfort. In Pasolini, as we will see, the saint is presented as the bearer of a singularly radical ethics of subjective autonomy. As such, the saint stands in close alliance to the figure of the youth while signaling a qualitative leap. The saint magnifies the impasse we detected in chapter 4 (the youth’s impossible quest for a liberation of enjoyment within a parasitical system that feeds off rebellion) and simultaneously takes its subjective consequences to the absolute extreme, thus transforming the entire situation in which this impasse appears.

A final note about the objects of study for this chapter. A discussion of the role of sainthood in Pasolini’s vast body of work, and a comprehensive critique of his conception of the sacred, lie outside the scope of this book.6 Our focus here will be at once more modest and more partisan: Pasolini alone seems to have been able to elevate the saint to the level of a figure, capable of revealing fundamental impasses of a historical sequence and point to the possible emergence of a political subjectivity.7 Therefore, we are interested in a sort of circumscribed inquiry into Pasolini’s cinema aimed at unearthing the fundamental logic of the saint as a tension-figure. Consequently, the scope of this chapter is intentionally limited. I only discuss two of Pasolini’s films released in the immediate proximity of 1968, the aforementioned Teorema and Pigsty (Porcile, 1969). The hope is that our findings will open up the possibility for a figural reassessment of other appearances of the saint in Pasolini’s cinema, in films like La Ricotta (1963), The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini, 1966), and beyond.

A “Little Secular Manual” of the Event: Teorema

A theorem is a statement that can be logically demonstrated on the basis of another, already accepted truth (an axiom, or another theorem). It is a truth that proceeds from truth. The axiom from which Pasolini begins in his 1968 film is one that the films discussed in chapter 4 have made explicit, and that we could formulate as follows: any equilibrium reached by the bourgeois family in the historical sequence of the long ’68 is rooted in crisis. In Before the Revolution and Come Play with Me, the equilibrium is fostered by a crisis (the incestual relation) that allows the status quo of the sweet life to perpetuate itself, while in Fists in the Pocket, the death of the bourgeois family simply coincides with its fantasized resurrection in another, yet unknown form. In either case, crisis paradoxically becomes a condition of equilibrium. Pasolini takes this situation of equilibrium in crisis as verified and sets out to prove that, given the current situation of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of an external force into the family would neither leave the status quo untouched nor induce a transformation that would let the status quo attest itself at another level of equilibrium. Instead, the only observed outcome is chaos—chaos in the sense of a heightened level of entropy that ultimately leads to the collapse of the family altogether. Pasolini formulates the starting point of the theorem thus: “The question is this: if a bourgeois family were visited by a young god, whether Dionysus or Jehovah, what would happen?”8

The proof the theorem hinges on has to do precisely with a repositioning of the figure of the youth as “a young god.” No longer a member of the family, the youth here assumes the shape of the Visitor (Terence Stamp), a divine presence without a name or a backstory that visits a Milanese bourgeois family, which includes the unnamed Father (Massimo Girotti), an industrialist; Lucia (Silvana Mangano), his wife and mother of his children; Pietro (Andrés José Cruz Soublette) and Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky); and Emilia (Laura Betti), the maidservant. The visit, announced by an arm-flapping mailman unequivocally named Angiolino (“little angel,” played by Ninetto Davoli), provides the film with its formal structure, systematically organized in different sections.

The initial introduction of the characters is shot in a lifeless sepia tone, suggesting that their world is one of pure repetition. The shots of Pietro leaving school and joking with his schoolmates, or of the Father being driven in his Mercedes around his factory, evoke a quotidian routine deprived of any specific marker of uniqueness. It is the emblem of a bourgeois sweet life seemingly impermeable to change. The film explicitly invites the spectator to look at the characters as generic types whose existence is illustrative of the prescriptions and privileges of their social class. In the novel of the same name written while he was shooting the film, Pasolini calls the description of the characters “data,” noting, “Every preliminary detail about the identity of the characters has a purely indicative value: it serves the purpose of concreteness, not the substance of things.”9 As Maurizio Viano has pointed out, the characters are “signs.”10 For a film that, in the words of Pasolini himself, wants to be “emblematic,” it is imperative that this data have the highest degree of generality.11

The arrival of the Visitor marks a shift to a vivid color palette and inaugurates the section on seductions. One by one, the members of the family succumb to an irresistible attraction toward the mysterious man. From one character to the next, the scene repeats itself with minor differences: after a moment of hesitation or futile resistance, they all give in and offer themselves to the Visitor.12 When Angiolino delivers a second telegram, prompting the Visitor to announce his imminent departure, the section on confessions begins. The characters speak to the Visitor about the collapse of their previous worldview and the need to find a new one. The Father questions a life accustomed to possession; Lucia acknowledges the emptiness of her existence; Pietro comes to terms with his homosexuality; and Odetta relinquishes her obsessive love for her father. Emilia remains conspicuously absent from this section, as Pasolini does not grant her a last word with the Visitor. Instead, in a silent parting gesture, she is shown carrying his suitcase to the cab waiting at the villa’s gates.

After the Visitor departs, the family implodes. The Father divests himself of all his possessions (including his factory, which he donates to his workers) and is last seen wandering naked and screaming in the desertlike, otherworldly landscape of Mount Etna; Lucia seeks reprieve from her existential pain in casual sex with young strangers who vaguely resemble the Visitor, but finds no satisfaction in it; Pietro takes up painting as a way to recapture the Visitor’s image but is deeply frustrated with the results; Odetta frantically tries to reconstruct the scene that led to her intercourse with the Visitor, but when she understands the futility of her endeavor, she falls into a persistent catatonic state. As for Emilia, Pasolini sets her apart again. She returns to her rural home, where she becomes a silent, saintlike mystical figure, subsisting exclusively on nettle soup and performing miracles, to the townspeople’s awe. Finally, accompanied by Pasolini’s mother, Susanna, she buries herself alive at a construction site and weeps out of joy, promising her companion that her tears will generate a new spring of life.

Given its pervasive biblical connotations, it would be tempting to look at the film as a statement about the role of the sacred in contemporary society.13 By the same token, and at the other end of the spectrum, it would be just as easy to read the irrational irruption of sexuality in the film along the lines of a celebration of sexual liberation and its revolutionary consequences. But a theorem is not a parable or a manifesto. There is no moral lesson to be evinced at the end; nor does it lay out strategies and objectives for a political program. The film’s avowed generality and abstraction position it at a distance from both empirical referents and explicit political or religious messages. So although it would be an oversight to simply dismiss the role played by religion in Teorema, any uncritical assumption of the film’s being about religion would be just as misleading. In the introduction to the novel, Pasolini defines his work in a way that could easily be applied to the film as well: it is “a little secular manual [manualetto laico] . . . about a religious irruption into the order of a Milanese family.”14 As a “secular manual,” we would argue, Teorema mobilizes religion not as content but as form. The religiosity that qualifies the event at the heart of the film—the “irruption” of the Visitor—should therefore be understood not as the essence of the event but as the formal principle that determines its appearance.

Of all the Christian elements in the film, the reference to Saint Paul offers the most useful paradigm for grasping this event and its logic. It is known that for Pasolini, Saint Paul was a figure of the utmost philosophical and political relevance, as testified by the film project on the life of the saint he pursued right after wrapping up production for Teorema.15 Paul provides Pasolini with the formal paradigm for thinking the complex relationship between the occurrence of an unforeseen irruption tearing asunder the fabric of the status quo and the fidelity of a subject to the consequences of that occurrence, which, in turn, retroactively confirms its evental, revolutionary character. In philosophy, Alain Badiou was the first to attempt to release Paul from his assigned place within the history of Christianity and elevate him to the level of a “poet-thinker of the event”: “If Paul helps us to seize the link between evental grace and the universality of the True,” Badiou writes, “it is so that we can tear the lexicon of grace and encounter away from its religious confinement.”16 It is thus no surprise that Badiou’s admiration for Pasolini would be grounded in a shared fascination for a figure whose relationship with truth stands as a conceptual model for any kind of militancy worthy of its name.

The crux of Emilia’s character resides precisely in her (and only her) fidelity to the encounter with the “young god” and her commitment to the truth that his advent introduces into the mundane repetitiveness of bourgeois life. Like Paul, she becomes the subject of a revelation, which prompts her to renounce her assigned place within the status quo, and with it any attachment to her identity. For Badiou, this is precisely Paul’s lesson. Because it is addressed to all, the universality of the truth associated with the evental grace supersedes any “communitarian” separation and can only result in the radical indifference of its subjects to the existing law.17 This is in stark contrast to the other members of the family, for whom the encounter with the Visitor only reveals an inability to become subjects and let go of the law. In their own individual ways, the family members find themselves stuck in a melancholic impulse to replicate the image of the event, a form of repetition that resembles the quotidian routine the film depicted before the arrival of the Visitor.

What is at stake in all these forms of bourgeois destitution is nothing less than the repetitive character of desire. Jacques Lacan and Badiou credit Paul for having articulated before Freud the logic of this specific formation of the unconscious. The family members in Teorema are prey to an automatism of desire that is entirely dependent on the law, for there is no desire without prohibition. As such, the only opposition to the law that they can conceive is that of transgression, which in turn generates the automatism and sustains the regime of law itself.18 This is the tragedy of the bourgeois family in the film; the initial equilibrium in crisis grounded in repetition is shattered by the event and results in the implosion of the family nucleus. Yet this implosion hardly signals a radical overturning of the law or the trace of a new beginning. The family members are still prisoners of their identities, only now in solitary confinement. Quod erat demonstrandum: as we have seen in chapter 4, the family had survived the assaults brought from within by a tourist of the revolution (Before the Revolution), a devious provocateur (Come Play with Me), and a scheming murderer (Fists in the Pocket). Nothing less than a divine entity is needed to break it apart.

The difference between the maidservant and the other members of the family is made even more explicit in the novel. In a poem titled “Complicity between the Lumpenproletariat and God,” the Visitor addresses Emilia in the first person: “You will be the only one to know, when I am gone, / that I will never come back, and you will look for me / where you will have to look for me.”19 Indeed, the problem of the family members is not only that they don’t understand that the Visitor “will never come back,” but also that they do not look for him where they should. Their attention turns inward in hope of finding a new identity to replace the one that the event stripped away. In the film, an extended circular pan shot of Odetta staring at the camera in a close-up drives the point home. Odetta’s dance with the camera evokes a bourgeois narcissism that leads the characters to turn their attention inward and makes their response to the Visitor a question of individual identity and imaginary self-recognition, an emblem of a bourgeoisie that “no longer has a soul, but only a conscience.”20 In Emilia, in contrast, we can discern the outline of a Pauline figure. She professes her fidelity to the event by relinquishing her identity (maidservant for Emilia, like Jew for Paul), thus pointing to the kernel of a possible political subjectivization.

In one of his passing remarks on the topic, Lacan defines the saint as a remainder—a reject, an outcast who is at the same time produced by and excluded from the (supposedly) functioning mechanisms of society.21 The abjection of the saint is specifically configured as useless. The saint is the fragment that doesn’t produce anything but that is itself the waste of the process of production.22 Again, the implicit reference here is Saint Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “We have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things.” Emilia embodies precisely this idea of saintliness as abjection. First she abandons her assigned place in the hierarchy of bourgeois society and generates a little cult following in her hometown; then, in a second departure, she gives herself over to abjection completely by leaving the farm and burying herself at a construction site at the city’s outskirts.

Commenting on Pasolini’s choice to set Emilia’s final act in this liminal space, Cesare Casarino brings the political significance of the character’s stance into focus:

[Emilia] refuses to choose between the city and the country, between the dominant history of progress and the residual myths of a lost golden age, between the economic miracle of modernization and the mystical miracles of pre-modern religion, between blind acceptance of modernity and faithful return to tradition, as well as—one might say—between so-called secularisms and so-called fundamentalisms of all sorts. In the end, neither of these options is viable, neither of these worlds has much to offer—and hence she tries to imagine and produce another space, another time, another history altogether different from both.23

It is precisely by becoming useless that the saint proves useful. By occupying the position of the castoff of society, the saint rejects the false dichotomy between a “blind acceptance of modernity” and a “faithful return to tradition,” opting instead to generate a new space—a new event site—that is autonomous from either option. As Stefania Benini puts it, “the Pauline word . . . transfixes—lacerates and crucifies, we can say—the fabric of the present with the announcement of a liberated future that appears obsolete (inattuale) but is invoked in our present time.”24 It is in this sense that we should read Lacan’s remark about the saint’s laughter (“the more saints, the more laughter”) being nothing less than a “way out of the capitalist discourse.”25 In the capitalist discourse, the subject is prey to the peculiar illusion that the solution to the problem of her own division resides in the surplus of gratification or enjoyment she attains by obtaining the objects she seeks. The Father, the prime representative of the capitalist discourse in the film, follows precisely this logic in his act of donating his factory to the workers. He thinks that simply attaining a certain desired condition (dispossession) will provide a solution to the rift caused by the encounter with the Visitor. As a consequence, he understands the possibility of the new only in the terms of an individual, isolated adjustment of the structure’s functioning. The justice he is looking for amounts to little more than mere fairness, a discolored simulacrum of Emilia’s commitment to radical autonomy.26

This is the family’s fateful error: believing that there would be an identitarian—and therefore imaginary—solution to a condition of division that is inherent to the human as such, and that the Visitor confronts them with. To the Father’s Franciscan gesture of surrender, Pasolini juxtaposes Emilia’s Pauline fidelity to the event, which follows a properly saintly path that consists in “not giving a damn for distributive justice.”27 Instead of looking for a solution to the division of the subject introduced by the encounter with the Visitor, Emilia’s character posits the absolute inescapability of that division and of its correlate surplus of enjoyment. As a saint, she becomes “the refuse of jouissance,” the embodiment of its excess.28

This is only one side of the matter, however. In becoming the refuse of jouissance, Emilia fashions for herself a way not to succumb to the family’s destiny of subjective collapse. She becomes what Lacan calls the sinthome. A symptom (of which sinthome is an archaic spelling) situated beyond the workings of the symbolic and beyond meaning altogether, the sinthome is not a message to be deciphered but rather the marker of an individual subjective enjoyment that resists interpretation absolutely: “I define the symptom by the fashion in which each enjoys [jouit] the unconscious insofar as the unconscious determines him.”29 But the sinthome is also a survival strategy concocted by the individual in a situation where symbolic structures and imaginary identifications falter, and one’s own subjectivity runs the risk of collapsing into psychotic dissolution. This is precisely what happens to Odetta and the Father in Teorema. They are unable to forge their own singular, viable way of maintaining a modicum of subjective consistency after the event, and as a result, they succumb to psychosis.

The sinthome can then be understood as a self-fashioned artifice that allows one to live in the face of the threat of constant subjective destitution. Emilia’s arc makes clear that the only way to deal with surplus enjoyment without being swallowed by psychosis is to develop some sort of individual know-how, a singular savoir faire that rejects any positivistic attempt at finding a permanent solution to the problem of surplus enjoyment (and its attendant subjective split) embodied by the Visitor.30 In Lacan’s puns, the sinthome is not only a saint (saint homme—or femme, in this case) but also a “synthetic man” (synth-homme)—that is, the artificial by-product of one’s own act of self-creation.

The deliberate gesture of the saint as sinthome carries fundamental ethical implications. “The saint doesn’t see himself as righteous,” Lacan says, “which doesn’t mean that he has no ethics. The only problem for others is that you can’t see where it leads him.”31 There is no sense of generic righteousness that motivates Emilia’s actions, no desire to impart a lesson or repent for her sins. Emilia simply behaves in the only way she considers possible after encountering the Visitor. Her sinthomatic behavior follows an inscrutable but steadfast trajectory that leads to the extreme gesture of self-sacrifice. In Teorema, enjoyment and ethics find an enigmatic alliance in the saint. The logic underpinning this alliance, and the pitfalls of reactionary subsumption to which it is vulnerable, are explored in even greater detail in Pigsty.

Annihilation/Assimilation: Pigsty

The film is split into two story lines. One takes place in a nondescript antiquity, possibly in the fifteenth century, where a young man (Pierre Clementi) roams a barren landscape (Mount Etna, again) in search of victims to murder and devour. A small following gathers around the young man as the violence continues, until the government of the nearby city manages to capture the group of cannibals. Betrayed by his followers, the young man is sentenced to death and eaten alive by a pack of dogs. The second story line revolves around Julian (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the young heir of the Klotz industrial empire on the eve of the Wirtschaftswunder in postwar Germany. To his father’s bafflement, Julian is apathetic and indifferent to everything that surrounds him, including his politicized fiancée (Anne Wiazemsky). His only source of solace (and sexual gratification) are the pigs that live on a nearby farm. The father (Alberto Lionello) is gathering intelligence about an emerging competitor, the mysterious Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi). When the latter unexpectedly pays a visit to Klotz, it is revealed that Herdhitze was in fact a Nazi officer directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. In response to this revelation, Herdhitze hints that he is aware of Julian’s zoophiliac inclinations. On the basis of this reciprocal blackmail (“a tale of pigs for a tale of Jews”), the two industry titans agree to a merger of their corporations. But on the day of the gala celebrating the merger, Julian throws himself to the pigs, who devour him instantly. As the news of the tragedy reaches Herdhitze, he orders the witnesses to not say a word to Klotz, thus preserving the value of his bargaining chip.

The idea of saintliness outlined in Teorema with the character of Emilia returns here in the redoubled form of the cannibal and the zoophile, both abject refuses of jouissance condemned to a life at the margins of the community. Julian and the cannibal can only satisfy their desire in a marginal space removed from the city and the villa as seats of power—the desert and the pigsty, respectively. As with Emilia, the saintliness of the cannibal and the zoophile hinges on an identification with the useless waste that translates into a certain suspension of, and autonomy from, the Other as symbolic law. Emilia’s fidelity to the event in Teorema persists in Pigsty, but refracted through the prism of a new historical situation determined by the advent of 1968 itself, understood not as a mere set of factual occurrences but rather as a moment of radical reorganization of discourses around desire and enjoyment. The shift from Teorema to Pigsty is clear. In Teorema, Emilia’s saintliness is a “way out,” the autonomous affirmation of a third space that rejects the dichotomy between melancholic attachment (Lucia, Pietro) and psychotic break (the Father, Odetta). Emilia’s extreme gesture of fidelity to the event is ultimately an affirmation of life, as her becoming waste opens up the possibility of a new, unforeseen future. In Pigsty, however, the apostasy of the saint only leads to obliteration and defeat. In the opposite and specular forms of unchecked aggression and unconditional love, the cannibal’s and the zoophile’s commitment to their desires pushes them toward a similar fate of isolation and death. Yet, we should not assume that the film’s two story arcs are simply reflections of each other. In fact, if the figure of the saint is fundamentally similar in the cannibal and the zoophile, the way in which they are defeated is markedly different, as the law asserts its dominance over these two refuses of jouissance in two distinct ways. The discontinuity between the two parts of Pigsty, then, should be read as signaling a fundamental shift from one regime of enjoyment to another.

Let us consider the cannibal first. His enjoyment is emphatically cast as foreign, inaccessible. It is not only antisocial, but also—like Teiresias in The Cannibals, also played by Clementi—unspeakable; the cannibal only speaks at the moment of sentencing, repeating three times: “I killed my father, I’ve eaten human flesh, I tremble with joy.” The anti-Oedipal cliché omnipresent in the discourse around ’68 receives here a stark literalization: with his taboo-breaking embrace of cannibalism, the young man has removed paternal prohibition as the obstacle toward full enjoyment and can now “tremble with joy.” This enjoyment is framed as a surplus, an unruly excess that threatens the nearby city. Pasolini frames the city’s reaction to this unsettling surplus in a very precise manner. The sentence is passed through the voice of an invisible judge as the townspeople gather at the public spectacle of the trial and the young cannibal occupies center stage. The disembodied, acousmatic voice (the judge) is none other than the old Master’s voice, the archaic mode of sovereign power that holds what Foucault calls “the right of life and death” over its subjects.32 However, this sovereign power doesn’t quite know what to do with this refuse of jouissance that is the cannibal-saint, so it simply frames it as a form of criminal deviance and deals with it accordingly—that is, outside the city walls—in hope of making it disappear without a trace. In Pasolini’s mythical precapitalist time, the form of defeat of the youth-saint is annihilation. Surplus enjoyment is a threat that needs to be eradicated for the good of the community.

Not so in postwar Germany, where Julian, whom Klotz Senior describes as “an embalmed saint,” is literally digested by a new discursive organization—one in which surplus enjoyment is counted and appropriated by the capitalist. No longer a threat to the community but rather a source of wealth, the zoophile-saint as refuse of jouissance is fully recaptured and put to use by the productive machine. Again, saintly uselessness becomes of the utmost utility, but in an inverted form. Rather than indicating “a way out of the capitalist discourse,” like Emilia, Julian and his secret enjoyment become their precondition, the bargaining chip that allows for a new monopolistic conglomerate to come into existence. The defeat of the saint here is marked not by annihilation but, more pessimistically, by subsumption. The refuse of jouissance embodied by the saint is assigned a specific exchange value (“a story of pigs for a story of Jews”) and thus becomes counted, and accounted for, in the capitalist discourse. In this new regime, everything can be digested, even saintliness.33

It is precisely through this process of digestion of the saint that Klotz and Herdhitze can attain what they call their “new youthfulness” (nuova giovinezza). Lacan foresaw precisely this situation when he declared, “It’s not as if the smart alecks aren’t lying in wait hoping to profit from [the saint’s enjoyment] so as to pump themselves up again.”34 The separation of the figure of the saint into the cannibal and the zoophile thus illustrates a shift in the way power deals with the intractable refuse of jouissance: annihilation at the hands of a sovereign power in precapitalist times for the former, and assimilation facilitated by capital’s strategic flexibility for the latter. While the destinies of the two saints are ultimately similar, the structural conditions in which they live and die are remarkably different.

This logic of enjoyment as a persistent refuse or waste prompts a more general consideration about the figure of the saint and the distance that separates it from its figural next of kin, the youth. In a truly Pauline gesture, Pasolini breaks with the dialectic of law and transgression that informed the films analyzed in chapter 4. We can see how the position assumed by Pasolini’s saints has little to do with the dialectic at work in Before the Revolution and Come Play with Me. There is no tactically subversive intent in the figures of the cannibal and the zoophile, no calculated decision to infringe on the rules, be it taking a vacation from the sweet life, as in Before the Revolution, or playing a game of pretend, as in Come Play with Me. In this sense, Fabrizio and Alvise, the protagonists of these two films, are no saints. They do not share the commitment to one’s own desire and the radical suspension of the symbolic Other that we see emblematized by Emilia in Teorema and the two protagonists of Pigsty. In fact, all the instances of the youth discussed in chapter 4 cannot separate themselves from the unavoidable presence of the Other, for it is precisely this presence that gives meaning to their rebellion in the first place. This is certainly the case for Bertolucci, Samperi, and Bellocchio, but even in Cavani and Caligari the symbolic remains as the inescapable pole of a dialectic of transgression. In The Cannibals, the collection and burial of the protesters’ corpses appears as a rebellion against the Other of the state; in Toxic Love, drug addiction fulfills the role of a spectacle of defeat staged for the enjoyment of the Other of civil society.

This is the fundamental difference between the saint and the youth. Pasolini believes in the possibility of an ethical subjectivity that comes into existence on the basis of a radical postevental commitment, and he puts the saint at the center of this process of subjectivation. In doing so, Teorema and Pigsty leave behind the dialectic of law and transgression proper to desire, instead situating the figure of the saint at the level of enjoyment and drive. By positing a suspension of the symbolic order, Julian and the cannibal affirm their existence beyond the pleasure principle, beyond any measure of the good and the appropriate, beyond law itself. This uncompromising assertion of autonomy sets the saint apart from the youth. While the saint opens up—like Emilia—a third space for herself, the youth’s rebellion always takes place within the horizon of the Other.

This is also why the saint may be a figure of defeat but never of surrender. There is no returning to the sweet life for Emilia, Julian, or the cannibal. Yet the pessimism that permeates Pigsty can hardly be overlooked; in fact, even the apparent hope associated with the character of Emilia in Teorema takes on a slightly different nuance in the darker light cast by the later film. The protracted silences, the enigmatic miracles, the final gesture of self-effacement—could we not read Emilia’s arc as a retreat into a certain mysticism of the ineffable? As a mystic, she only offers a nebulous promise of redemption, gesturing toward the possibility of a new beginning rather than assuming onto herself the pragmatic burden of militancy. After all, Saint Paul himself—Emilia’s alter ego—was seen by Pasolini also as a figure evoking a crisis of militancy. The screenplay for the film on Saint Paul that was never made, published after the author’s death, depicts the transformation of the saint from militant to priest—that is, from a subject of the event to a high-ranking, power-hungry functionary of church bureaucracy.35

The priest, the mystic, the cannibal, the zoophile: in Pasolini, the saint as a figure can only emerge in the form of a failure to live up to the ideal of pure saintliness. The circumstances of these failures are different in each case; for Saint Paul it is a deviation, for Emilia a retreat, for the protagonists of Pigsty a defeat against an all-powerful structure. Yet there seems to be one limitation that all these Pasolinian figures share: the lack, or loss, of a universalistic address in their ethical commitment. The form of commitment that defines all these saintlike figures fails to produce a true political subject because it renounces the possibility to turn a singular experience of the event into a universal claim about humanity as such—in other words, it renounces the possibility to be militant. Emilia shuns the collectivity of the townspeople to withdraw into a solitary sacrifice; Saint Paul abandons his mission and enters the church hierarchies; Julian and the cannibal reduce their quest for autonomy to an individualizing, existential gesture. Yet this might be precisely what the films think about the historical sequence of 1968: the ambiguous politics that stem from the quest of a pure liberation of enjoyment, a quest that the youth pursues within the coordinates of desire, and that the saint expands into the territories of the drive. Julian’s case is in this sense emblematic. His failure to attain some level of a political subjectivization is inextricable from his individualizing ethical stance, which Herdhitze exploits to his own advantage. This is why, in the last analysis, even saintliness can be digested by the structure. The lack of a universalistic horizon that is rooted in, yet reaches beyond, fidelity to one’s own desire allows the capitalist to make a quick meal of this refuse of jouissance.

Lorenzo Chiesa has credited Pasolini with the intuition that the injunction to emancipate oneself sexually goes hand in hand with the imperative to appropriate and consume economic surplus—a confirmation, if needed, of Lacan’s intuition that surplus value and surplus enjoyment are in fact homogeneous.36 In the long run, the existential revolution of the youth in 1968 ended up serving the reproductive apparatus of “tolerant” late capitalism—a tolerance whose obverse is the obscene superegoical imperative to enjoy. In the words of Pasolini, “A kind of society that is tolerant and permissive is the one in which neuroses are most frequent, insofar as such a society requires that all possibilities it allows be exploited, that is, it requires a desperate effort so as not to be less than everybody else in a competitiveness without limits.”37

It is important to clarify that what Pigsty thinks is not some cynical dismissal of 1968 as a nonevent, or an inability of 1968 to generate its saintly subjects, which would amount to the same. Saints exist, as do witnesses to their acts, like the peasant Maracchione in Pigsty (Ninetto Davoli), the transhistorical presence that mourns the deaths of the premodern cannibal and the modern zoophile, in a role similar to the one fulfilled by Pasolini’s mother, Susanna, who bears witness to Emilia’s self-sacrifice in Teorema. It is not surprising that Pasolini would resort to these subproletarian characters to suggest the possibility of reactivating the latent universality of the saint’s acts. But do these witnesses indicate the rise of a new subject, interpellated by the encounter with the saint? Pasolini does not give us any clear indication one way or the other. Yet it is precisely in this undecidability that the evental nature of 1968 resides: “a series of obscure events,” as Badiou called it—that is, a historical sequence to which we cannot ascribe a proper unity.38 With his obstinate and lost saints, Pasolini undertakes the arduous work of thinking the possibilities of subjectivation amidst this obscurity, between the horizon of subjective autonomy and the pitfalls of reactionary assimilation.