Salò and the School of Abuse

This chapter revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade set in the fascist Salò Republic. Challenging a critical tendency to see the film as forward-looking or indeed “prophetic,” the chapter attends to Pasolini’s complex and abiding engagements with the past. These include, the chapter argues, engagements with the obsolete forms of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as mere “instruction.” Salò redeploys these forms as it constructs and compels viewers to inhabit an old school. For Pasolini—whose film was, he said, “conceived as a rite”—the painful, ritual re-enactment of the past becomes a means of countering the collective forgetting of fascism and an alternative to fascism’s remaining “real.” Schooling spectators in what Ernesto De Martino calls the salience of the “bad past that returns,” Pasolini refuses the postwar imperative to disavow the fascist past, to render it a mere “parenthesis.” He draws not only on Sade’s “school for libertinage,” but also on the long-discounted techniques of “instruction” in order to insist that any move beyond fascism must proceed from reckoning with it, not denial. The capacity for this reckoning is what Salò seeks to impart.