‘Nostalgia for the sacred’: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem

Abstract

As a pervasive term in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, ‘nostalgia’ remains theoretically enigmatic and often politically contradictory. This article argues for the critical potential of nostalgia in Pasolini’s political aesthetics through a seemingly unlikely subject: his 1968 film and novel Teorema (Theorem). Set in post-war Milan, Theorem depicts the transformative encounter between a godlike visitor and five archetypes of the bourgeois household. After he leaves, they must reckon with his departure. I suggest that Pasolini’s formal and theoretical interest in nostalgia is crucial to understanding Theorem’s aesthetic invocation of the sacred, which the film stages through an interplay of presence and absence in bodies, spaces and temporalities. Unpacking the etymological roots algos (‘pain’) and nostos (‘return’), my reading forges intertextual connections within Pasolini’s oeuvre while also suggesting that Pasolini’s oblique, materially rooted nostalgia encourages a re-evaluation of the critical productivity of this term more broadly.