Heresies: The Body of Pasolini's Semiotics

Abstract

This essay offers a critical reconsideration of Pier Paolo Pasolini's theoretical writings on film, showing their links to current developments in critical theory. Though heavily criticized by his contemporaries, Pasolini appears today to have anticipated some of the crucial issues of post-structuralist thinking and of the condition of postmodernity. Showing these links, my essay aims to reassess the work of one of the most important intellectual and artistic figures of our times, one whose contribution has yet to be acknowledged fully in the U.S. In fact, only a very small portion of Pasolini's volcanic production has ever been translated into English. Even when translated, Pasolini's work has not made a real impact on the American cultural landscape, while for Italian, as well as French and German, culture, it holds a position of central importance. The recent translation of Heretical Empiricism, one of his many books of collected essays, published in Italy almost twenty years ago, is a step toward the entry of Pasolini's critical into the realm of American culture.' Finally available to English readers, this book enables a reconsideration by offering a sample of the range of Pasolini's cultural input and the expanse of his intellectual horizon. A true Renaissance man, Pasolini wrote extensively on a variety of topics and in diverse fields, and practiced in many different creative media. His engagement in critical claimed theory as a practice of To anyone who asked him whether he was a novelist, a theorist, a filmmaker, a critic, a polemicist, a playwright, a poet writing in dialect or in standard Italian language, he would answer, I am a writer, just as it says on my official ID. In any of its forms, the body of writing is the center of Pasolini's research. His multifaceted and eclectic creative trajectory was marked by civil activism, just as his position as a writer was characterized by a passionate engagement in the cultural and political debates of his time. Practicing a form of utopian thinking, he incessantly intervened with his scandalous work in socio-cultural praxis, and let his transgressive curiosity contaminate the separate areas and modes of professional writing. Outlined in the following pages are a few aspects of Pasolini's wide-ranging practice of writing. Over the years, as a critic and theorist, he collaborated with