Pasolini against the Power

by guest contributor Carlo Lancelotti

In the United States, Pier Paolo Pasolini is mostly known as a creative and eclectic filmmaker, the director of late neo-realist works like Accattone, of the memorable Gospel According to Matthew, of the Trilogy of Life and finally of the controversial Salò of 1975, the year of Pasolini’s gruesome (and still unsolved) murder on a beach near Rome. His literary works as a poet, novelist and essayist are less known, although two volumes of his poetry have been published in English, and a few novels (Theorem, Boys Alive) are also available.

There is an area of his work, however, that has never been translated and that remains largely unknown in the English-speaking world: the 1973-75 essays that he (mostly) wrote for Corriere della Sera, and which were published posthumously in the volumes Lettere luterane and Scritti corsari. That these essays are not available in English is especially unfortunate because in them we find, arguably, the full intellectual maturity of Pasolini as a social observer and political thinker, often in open rupture with is own earlier “picaresque” and more naively progressive self—Lettere luterane, for example, includes a bitter “abjuration” of his own movies in the Trilogy of Life, which he had completed hardly a year earlier.

Apart from the fact that there is little money to be made translating dead Italian authors, Pasolini’s final essays may have not found a translator also because they are somewhat scandalous for the leftish-progressive American bien-pensants who are generally interested in Pasolini. Even the one anthology I know that includes some of his non-fiction prose [In Danger edited with an introduction by Jack Hirshman (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010)] selects almost exclusively works of literary criticism. To the editor’s credit, however, there is one essay from Scritti corsari that shows what was on the mind of Pasolini in the last two years of his life (not by chance, I suspect, it is prudently listed in a section titled “Provocations” next to an interview with Ezra Pound!). It is titled “The power without a face. The true Fascism and therefore the true anti-Fascism.”

The title conveys effectively the message of the essay: Pasolini has noticed that after World War Two a new type of power has emerged in the Western world, which has become fully dominant in the mid-1960’s. Unlike older forms of power, it is not identified with a dictator or with a party (it is “without a face”), but this makes it no less oppressive and totalizing. More so, in fact, for not being tied to any specific group or individual, so that it deserves its own capitalization:

I am writing “Power” with capital P … only because I sincerely don’t know what such Power consists of and who represents it … [it has] certain “modern” traits derived from tolerance and from a hedonistic ideology [but also] ferocious and substantially repressive traits; the trait of tolerance is in fact false, because in reality there is no man who is supposed to be so normal and so conformist as the consumer, and, as for the hedonistic ideology, it clearly hides a decision to prearrange everything with a ruthlessness as yet unknown to history. Therefore, this new Power, not yet represented by anyone and caused by a “mutation” of the ruling class, is in reality … a “total” form of fascism. But this new Power has also culturally homologated Italy: it is therefore a repressive homologation even though obtained by the imposition of a form of hedonism and a joie de vivre.

For Pasolini, the undeniable, shocking manifestation of this new Power is “homologation,” the fact that in a few years the richness and diversity of Italy’s class cultures and regional cultures have been wiped away, and everybody has become culturally identical. The rich and the poor, the Friulan peasants of his youth and the Roman underclass of his movies, the educated and the ignorant: they all have become consumers, they have all been magically turned into bourgeois, with the same ideas, the same aspirations, the same desires. Such a massive transformation could not have happened so quickly without the consent and the encouragement of those who control the economic and cultural levers of society. It may be diffuse and collective but it is Power, the power of the Western social elites who have decided “to abandon the Church … to transform the peasants and the underclass into petty-bourgeois, and, above all, … to carry out a ‘Development’ at any cost, by producing and consuming,” and in the process have carried out what might be called a “cultural genocide.”

This is not the place for an in-depth discussion, so I want to mention just one aspect of Pasolini’s writings on the “new Power” which I find very particularly interesting: the way he sees the plight of the Church in the new culture. Pasolini was a life-long Marxist atheist, who all his life had nothing good to say about the Catholic Church, which he routinely accused of clericalism, complicity with Fascism, sexual repression, bigotry and the like. And yet, in his last essays he realized that the Church was no longer part of the “system.” The men of the Church had not understood that “the bourgeoisie represents a new spirit that at first would compete with the religious spirit … and then would end up replacing it in giving people a total and unique vision of life.” In its early stages this new vision had needed Christianity, but now “the future belongs to the young bourgeoisie that no long needs to hold on to power with the classic tools, that has no use for the Church … Indeed the new bourgeois Power needs in consumers a completely pragmatic and hedonistic spirit. A technical and purely worldly universe is that in which the cycle of production and consumption can take place most naturally.”

Clearly, Pasolini diagnosis is very different from that of many of his Catholic contemporaries, who had no doubt that the Church could find a place in the new, technologically advanced, economically prosperous and “democratic” world of the 1960’s. Pasolini, on the contrary was convinced that the new totalizing bourgeois civilization was going to achieve a “natural dissolution” of the Church. What is most striking, though, is at the end of his life he, a non-believer, identified the Church he had always sharply rejected as the only possible center of resistance to the new Power. For anybody familiar with his world view, the following passage from Scritti corsari (September 1974) is quite amazing:

This is certain: that if during its long history of power the Church has committed many and serious faults, the most serious fault would be to accept passively its own liquidation by a power that ridicules the Gospel. From a radical, perhaps utopian or millennialist (this word is appropriate) perspective it is clear what the Church ought to do to escape an inglorious end. It should move to the opposition … Taking on again a fight with in any case belongs to its tradition (the fight of the Papacy against the Empire), but not to gain power, the Church could be the leader, grandiose but not authoritarian, of all those who refuse (and this is a Marxist speaking precisely  as a Marxist) the new consumerist power which is completely irreligious, totalitarian, violent, falsely tolerant, and in fact more repressive than ever, corrupting, degrading … It is this refusal then that the Church could symbolize, going back to the origins, that is, to opposition and revolt. Either it does this or it accepts a power that no longer wants it; i.e. it commits suicide.

 What is most interesting, and I conclude, is that whereas until the end of his life Pasolini had no faith in the proper sense, in another sense he still  encountered Catholicism “as a Marxist speaking precisely as a Marxist” because he recognized that only the Church was somehow equipped to oppose the hegemonic neo-bourgeois culture of the new affluent West. This is a very strange homage from a very unexpected source, but a homage nonetheless.

Carlo Lancelotti is a Professor of Mathematics at the College of Staten Island and a faculty member in the Physics Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to his scholarly work in physics, he has translated into English and published three volumes of works by the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce. Lancellotti has also written essays of his own on Del Noce and other topics, which have appeared in Communio, Public Discourse, and Church Life Journal. Follow him @_CLancellotti

Check out my interview with Carlo on the pod.

Carlo’s piece is part of Cracks in PoMo’s new venture of including guest writers, which you can read more about here. Please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this page for more riveting content. If you’re new to Cracks in Pomo, check out the About page or read up on our Essentials. Also check out our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Other Pasolini related content: Review of The Gospel According to Matthew; Bad Bunny, Pasolini, and the Spectacular Society; my discussion with Jack the Perfume Nationalist on Salo (podcast); my discussion with Schizotopia on Salo (podcast); my presentation on Gospel (podcast)

Photo taken in Milan.