From ITALIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 1, SPRING 2007

LIBERATION HURTS: VIOLENCE, MASOCHISM AND
ANTI-CAPITALISM ACCORDING TO PASOLINI
Fabio Vighi


Salò makes visible how when the wall of prohibition
sustaining the economy of desire falls, we enter the shadowy domain of drive,
whose circulation implies the nightmare of an endless encounter with jouissance,
‘since jouissance is, at its most elementary, ‘pleasure in pain’, that is, a perverted pleasure
provided by the very painful and inherently masochistic experience of repeatedly
missing one’s goal’.43 And what the libertines discover at the end of their journey into
the dark realm of drive is that the impossibility of (attaining) the object coincides with
the impossible/disavowed/excessive kernel of the self. Pasolini tells us that the external
ever-elusive ‘Thing’ is also ‘our Thing’, the most intimate place inside us. Such a
realisation cannot but have a devastating effect on the subject: as the final part of the
film suggests, it implies the collapse of the libertines’ psychic balance.