Friday, February 19, 2010

repudiations



“I repudiate the Trilogy of Life, even though I do not repent having made it. I cannot, in fact, deny the sincerity and necessity that drove me to represent bodies and their culminating symbol, the sexual organs.”

“This sincerity and necessity belong to the struggle to democratize the ‘right to self-expression’ and to liberate sexuality. In light of the cultural and anthropological crisis, ‘innocent’ bodies, with the archaic, dark, vital violence of their sexual organs, seemed the last bulwark of reality.”

“Finally the representation of Eros, seen in a human environment barely surpassed by history, but still physically present (in Naples, in the Near East), was something that fascinated me personally, as author and man.”

“Now everything has turned upside down.”

“The struggle for democratized self-expression and sexual liberation has been brutally surpassed and thwarted by the vast (but false) tolerance conceded by the consumerist establishment.”

“The ‘reality’ of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, tampered with by the consumerist establishment; in fact, the violence done to bodies has become the most macroscopic element in the new human era.”

“Third, private sexual lives (such as mine) have undergone the trauma of both false tolerance and physical degradation, and that which in sexual fantasies was pain and joy, has become suicidal disappointment, shapeless sloth.”

“The collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past. Life is a pile of insignificant and ironic ruins.”

“Therefore, I am adapting myself to the degradation and I am accepting the unacceptable. I am maneuvering to rearrange my life. I am forgetting how things were before. The beloved faces of yesterday are beginning to yellow. Before me – little by little, slowly, without further alternatives – looms the present. I readjust my commitment to a greater legibility (Salò?).”

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Repudiation,” 1975.

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