The art dialectic in Passolini’s <i>Salò or the the 120 days of Sodom</i>

Abstract

In this article we address an analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, a film adaptation of the unfinished novel Les cent-vingt journées de Sodome by the Marquis de Sade. In Salò, Pasolini places the story in a different historical frame —a village close to Salò, headquarters of the Italian Social Republican, the last bastion of fascism (1943-1945)— and turns sadistic sexuality into fascist sexuality as a political allegory against the power structure, a critique he extends to bourgeois democracies and to the society of neoliberal consumption. Our work seeks to analyse the adaptation of the novel to the filmic medium; explore the notion of sexuality as political allegory; and examine the figure of the Pianist, Pasolini’s original contribution. To this end, we focus, on one hand, on Michel Foucault’s and Giogio Agamben’s notion of somatopolitics as government technology of bodies —in its two versions: thanatopolitics and biopolitics— and, on the other hand, on Adorno’s writings, through which we approach the radicalization of enlightened
reason as instrumentalization by totalitarian regimes. Finally, from this perspective, we consider the character of the Pianist and the music she performs in the film as a figure of resistance against power. Her suicide suggests to us a new interpretation of Salò as an allegory of the “death of art” or the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz.