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Before completing his uncharacteristically hopeful filmic vision of an African Oresteia, Pier Paolo Pasolini invented a theatrical continuation of Aeschylus's trilogy. "Pilade" (1966/70) imagines what happens after Orestes, having being absolved by the Aeropagos in Athens, goes back to Argos. With its clear allusions to political developments in the last century - fascism, the Resistance, and Communist revolutions - the play reads as a mythical allegory for the situation of engaged intellectuals in thetwentieth century. As Christoph F. E. Holzhey's contribution '"La vera Diversità": Multistability, Circularity, and Abjection in Pasolini's "Pilade"' shows, Pasolini's imagined continuation of the Oresteia challenges an ideology of rational foundation and progress by moving through a series of aspect changes prompted by sudden events that allow for some integration while also creating new divisions. After all possible alliances among the principal characters - Orestes, Electra, and Pylades - have been played through, Pylades curses reason for its deceptive, consoling, and violent function and embraces his abjected position of true diversity beyond intelligibility. However, Holzhey argues, rather than functioning as the play's telos, this ending is an open one and participates in the paradoxical performance of a self-contradictory subjectivity and a circular temporality without entirely giving up hope for a truly different alternative.
By focusing on Pasolini's uncompleted film project "San Paolo", Luca Di Blasi's article 'One Divided by Another: Split and Conversion in Pasolini's "San Paolo"' analyzes the notion of split (the split in the structure of time and, above all, the split of the figure of Paul) and concentrates especially on the very moment of Paul's Damascene conversion. Di Blasi refers to the "Kippbild" as a model that can be used to understand better certain ambivalences in Pasolini's Paul. Locating Pasolini's reading of the founder of the Church in a triangulation with two major contemporary philosophers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, Di Blasi shows that two opposing possibilities of interpreting Paul - as militant subject of a universal event and its necessary consequences (Badiou) and as representative of softness, weakness, poverty, "homo sacer" (Agamben) - fit perfectly with the two aspects of Pasolini's Paul. Pasolini's profoundly split Paul thus represents a dichotomy which disunites two major figures of contemporary leftist thought.