Luca Di Blasi,Manuele Gragnolati,and Christoph FE Holzhey (eds) The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities,Traditions,Geographies

Reviewed by: Damiano Benvegnù, University of Notre Dame, USA

There are few Italian artists of the twentieth century who have received more international attention than Pier Paolo Pasolini. His multifaceted and, at intervals, deeply perceptive artistic production, as well as his visceral and problematic relationships with contemporary society, have made him one of the last Italian figures of total intellectual engagement, capable of reaching not only outside the sphere of art, but also beyond the borders of modern Italy. The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies testifies to this and offers a series of compelling interpretations of Pasolini’s frequent encounters with both the origins of Western culture and non-European traditions.

The point of departure for this volume is a 2011 conference organized by the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and focused on Pasolini’s engagement, especially from the 1960s onward, with classic texts from the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. The general content of The Scandal of Self-Contradiction mirrors the original focus of the conference but also arranges the material according to an original theoretical frame and pays distinct attention to the political, and contradictory, dimensions of Pasolini’s artistic discourse.

As regards the frame, the book is organized in three main sections, plus a final appendix, which includes a short essay by French contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou, the first translation into English (by Robert SC Gordon) of Pasolini’s ‘L’uomo di Bandung’, and two works by the Berlin visual artist Joulia Strauss. The idea behind the organization of the three main sections is one of the most poignant aspects of this volume and definitely its most significant theoretical contribution. The volume borrows from Gestalt Theory the concept of ‘multistability,’ i.e. the property of certain figures to alternate between two or more mutually exclusive states over time (for example, the so-called Rubin Vase), and explores whether or not such a phenomenon provides ‘an interesting model to understand better Pasolini’s attempt to create contradictions without ending up in any synthesis or reconciliation’ (p. 9). As a consequence, the main sections have ‘multistable’ titles – Subjectivities/Geographies, Geographies/Traditions, and Traditions/Subjectivities, respectively – and contain essays presenting aspects of Pasolini’s work in which these three elements intertwine in complex and unstable ways. This approach is especially pronounced in two of the most interesting contributions of the book, not accidentally by two of the three editors. In the first essay of the first section, Christoph Holzhey compares the circularity of multistable figures to how Pasolini depicts the character of Pilades in his eponymous play, and, through Queer Theory, articulates that Pilade actually suggests a provocative open ending which is also a self-contradictory political practice. The second section instead opens with Manuele Gragnolati’s analysis of Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, in which the author maintains that the African students in Pasolini’s movie were staged by the filmmaker in a conscious effort to contradict his potentially Eurocentric vision of Africa as a whole. Both essays, as well as other very compelling pieces such as Robert Gordon’s investigation of ‘Pasolini as Jew’ and Silvia Mazzini’s analysis of Pasolini’s controversial relationships with India, display how a variety of Pasolini’s works can be read according to a structure of self-contradiction that challenges both the traditional system of binary oppositions of Western thought and the almost correspondent tendency to resolve these dichotomies through the work of synthesis and progress. It is not surprising that a key figure of such strategy is thus Saint Paul, who in the contributions of Luca di Biasi and Bruno Besana becomes the multistable center of a triangulation between Pasolini himself, his never fully developed script for a movie on Saint Paul, and the recent interpretations of the apostle in terms of political philosophy by Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. Some of the other essays included in the volume have a more loose connection to multistability proper, but still shed an original light on aspects of Pasolini’s oeuvre that seem to be in direct conversation with contemporary issues, such as globalization (Giovanna Trento’s investigation of Pasolini’s ‘Panmeridionalism’), gender studies (Astrid Deuber-Mankonwsky’s essay on Medea), and transnationalism (Francesca Cadel’s ‘Outside Italy: Pasolini’s Transnational Vision of the Sacred and Tradition’).

The Scandal of Self-Contradiction is not an easy read: it is very dense, theoretically charged, and it may represent a challenge for those readers who work within the boundaries of Italian Studies and are not used to the jargon of contemporary philosophy. Moreover, although the title of the volume is taken from Le ceneri di Gramsci and therefore one might expect links to chronologically diverse aspects of Pasolini’s entire production, there are very few, scattered connections between the works explored in the singular essays (mostly dealing with Pasolini’s cinematographic and theatrical production of the 1960s) and the rest of his oeuvre. Yet, The Scandal of Self-Contradiction seems to me one of the most intriguing contributions to the recent re-interpretation of Pasolini’s ‘actuality,’ capable of influencing our future readings. In particular, two aspects of the book stand out. First, multistable figures not only seem indeed perfect models for several of Pasolini’s works, but also for his entire artistic trajectory. His attempt to build a system that would deny dialectical modernity seems to actually reveal its true features when read through the lenses of multistability. I can therefore easily foresee many fruitful contributions using this very same approach to Pasolini’s oeuvre and its many apparent contradictions, and I am definitely looking forward to exploring if such a multistable model functions with other works as well (his dialect poetry, for instance). Secondly, if one of the goals of this volume was to testify to Pasolini’s potential significance for contemporary political thought, indeed it hit its target. Although Pasolini is possibly not ‘the greatest poet of his generation,’ as Alain Badiou a bit too enthusiastically claims in his nonetheless fascinating essay (p. 271), nevertheless The Scandal of Self-Contradiction is convincing not only in showing the controversial uniqueness of his works, but also in trying to fulfill what, allegedly, was one of Pasolini’s last desires before his tragic murder: to be eventually translated in political terms capable of having an impact on the present.