Pier Paolo Pasolini Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Pier Paolo Pasolini - Essay Example Were it simply a question ÃŽ ¿f quantity, however, were Pasolini's art no more than the indulgence ÃŽ ¿f an unrepressed narcissist, there would be scant interest in a study ÃŽ ¿f this kind. Instead, his work offers an extraordinarily fertile and dense example ÃŽ ¿f how subjectivities are built on something other and something far more complex than merely saying 'I'. Indeed, one might say that his work offers an illustration ÃŽ ¿f the ultimate incompatibility ÃŽ ¿f saying 'I' and being 'I', in any cohesive sense these phrases might have (Benveniste, 1966, 259-60). For Pasolini does indeed, as Barberi Squarotti implies, constantly offer himself up for display in his work, but to such a degree ÃŽ ¿f intensity that conventional mediation 'is cast aside: he is personally, bodily present within language, as he explains in Petrolio, 'in queste pagine io mi sono rivolto al lettore direttamente [. . .] in carne e ossa'. In other words, he uses the textuality ÃŽ ¿f his work or the semiosis ÃŽ ¿f his multiform interventions in order to embody himself, to project himself into, rather than onto forms ÃŽ ¿f expression. The project is, ÃŽ ¿f course, deeply flawed and unrealizable, but also strangely utopian. It is an almost mystical aspiration to being-in-the text, to textual transubstantiation which can be related to his homosexuality. It represents a recourse to the essential signifier ÃŽ ¿f an 'authentic' body as a public locus ÃŽ ¿f discourse, in response to the exclusion from discourse and from normative sexual ideologies. But the recourse is a subversive and not a naturalizing one, since the irreducible aura f presence surrounding the body disavows coded norms (Dollimore, 1991). It radicalizes the relations between selfhood, signification and the real by projecting irreducible markers f the latter into the first two. It brings selfhood and form into uneasy synthesis, in a dynamic akin to that seen by De Lauretis, 1984, in Pasolini's essays in film semiology: a deployment and experience f forms f discourse as active and subjective