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Visualising “Unsacrificeable” Life: thinking with Salò against transcendence
In this essay, I will argue that Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Salò is not an imitation of the
work of the Marquis de Sade, but rather a funeral dirge to the sacrificial logic that
systematically underpins that work. The philosophical significance of this death
knoll is its destruction of the Western myth of sacrifice, heir to an arcane and
profound genealogy that can be traced from Socrates to Bataille. Armed with
horrifying courage, Salò explores what is required to rid thought of any vestige of
the myth of sacrifice, whilst simultaneously confronting what remains when life
has been stripped of all hope of transcendence. Employing the film to explore
Jean‐Luc Nancy’s idea of life as fundamentally “unsacrificeable”, I propose that
we understand Salò neither as a failure of adaptation nor as an apocalyptic
condemnation of bare life. Instead, in its visualisation of absolute negativity Salò
may paradoxically encourage a non‐representational engagement with the
present and with life affirmed in its finitude. In the first part of this essay I will
consider the models of sacrifice operative in the work of Sade and Bataille,
arguing that both rely on a relation to a transcendent Outside. I will show that
this transcendent relation, inherent to all models of sacrifice, is what makes it a
philosophically untenable position in relation to life. Both Nancy and Giorgio
Agamben have recently articulated the ‘unsacrificeabilty’ of life in important
ways; I will end by arguing that Salò contains key philosophical insights that
require us to reject Agamben’s unsacrficeable figure of the homo sacer. This is
due to its implicit insertion of an essence into finitude and a transcendent
Outside into temporality.
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Pasolini adapted Sade’s novel 120 Days of Sodom in 1975. Controversially set in
the temporary fascist republic of Salò in 1944, it has widely been regarded as a
failure of adaptation, for ‘Sade can in no way be represented’ (Barthes 1982,
101). Almost unanimously Pasolini’s last film was critiqued in comparison to the
‘infinite’ powers that Sade raised literature to (Foucault 1998a; Klossowski
1991; Calvino 1982). Given the Recommended Bibliography at the film’s opening,
there can be no doubt that Pasolini was aware of the risks he undertook in
adapting Sade’s text to film. The bibliography reads as a register of French
philosophers and literary critics who almost unanimously argued that the power
of Sade is entirely dependent on its relation to language and the literary; present
are Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir, Pierre Klossowski
and Phillipe Sollers. Conspicuously absent from the title card is Sade’s original
text, as well as Georges Bataille’s Eroticism in which Sade is discussed at length.
Salò must therefore be examined as an attempt to create something other than a
representation of the impossible universe of Sade. In acting as a meditation on
the rich philosophical tradition that has sprung from interpretations of Sade and
sacrifice, the film can be understood to eschew representation in favour of
concept creation. I will now specifically consider the question that is posed by
Jean‐Luc Nancy: ‘isn’t it time, finally, to take action: both the end of real sacrifice
and the closure of its phantasm?’(Nancy,1991,21). The film may be understood
as a visualisation of this question.
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Models of Sacrifice
A logic of sacrifice is operative in Sade, in which sovereignty is achieved through
the sacrifice of oneself as subject, for ‘at the very peak of the unlimited denial of
the other is a denial of oneself’ (Bataille 2006, 174). In the Sadean literary
universe, infinite negation in self‐sacrifice becomes the means by which ‘the
plane of human existence’ may be surpassed:
… the centre of Sade’s world is the necessity for sovereignty to affirm itself through an enormous
negation. This negation, which is carried out on a massive scale, which one individual instance is
not enough to satisfy, is essentially destined to surpass the plane of human existence
(Blanchot 2004,26).
Whilst Sadean self‐sacrifice appears as the converse of the Christian framework,
it relies on a principle shared with its adversary. This may be understood as a
relation of access to the infinite through finite life’s sacrificial possibility, for as
Bataille comments, in both: ‘what is important is to leave a world of real things’
(Bataille 1989, 49). It could therefore be posited that what is shared between
these different forms of sacrifice is a process of reversal, in which death comes to
act as the means by which the absolute essence of life is revealed, and life is
given meaning only through its transcendence in a movement of infinite
negativity or death.
In the thought of Bataille these models of sacrifice undergo an important
modification. It is the proximity to death, rather than the moment of death itself
that is decisive in modernity. As sacrifice is no longer a living institution, art has
become that which ‘offers us ravishment without death’ (Bataille 2003, 5),
preserving us on the edge of extinction, whilst avoiding the total destruction of
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the subject which would result in a ‘nothingness that abolishes everything’
(Bataille, ibid.). An awakening is thereby achieved in the subject by the
experience of sacrificial simulacra in art:
Art, no doubt, is not restricted to the representation of horror, buts its movement puts art
without harm at the height of the worst and, reciprocally, the painting of horror reveals the
opening onto all possibility. This is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in the
vicinity of death (Bataille, ibid., 6).
As a cinematically unprecedented catalogue of horror, Salò might be expected to
act as the definitive demonstration of the enduring significance of such sacrificial
structures. Examining the responses to the film, it seems that the aesthetic
criteria assumed by many critics actually has its basis in a sacrificial model akin
to that of Bataille, where ‘“Sacrifice” means appropriation of the Self in its own
negativity’ (Nancy ibid.,29) and art is understood as ‘the transgressive exposition
of the subject, who thereby appropriates himself and lets himself be
appropriated’ (Nancy ibid., 28).
Salò, however, does not follow this ancient narrative. Instead, it systematically
rules out sacrificial possibilities. The experience of violence and death through
the medium of the film do not yield access to the infinite. Proximity to death does
not reveal the essence of life, but instead tautologically leads us back only to
itself. Judged according to the function proposed by Bataille for a meditation on
sacrifice, the film is a failure:
… if there is any truth to the idea that human life is a trap […] reflecting on its (sacrifice’s)
fascination may enable us to discover what we are and to discover a higher world whose
perspectives exceed the trap (Bataille ibid.,3)
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Salò is so extremely disturbing because it gives no path by which the
claustrophobic dark interior may be exited. The victims and the libertines seem
firmly stuck in the trap of finitude; for no excesses or acts of violence (nor works
of art) move the characters any closer to ‘the cracks in the world’ (Bataille ibid.,
2). However, it may be suggested that by systematically closing off sacrificial
possibilities, Salò achieves something more radical than the majority of critics
had anticipated. For in its total closure of any ‘cracks’, the film can be seen to
dispense with the idea summarised by Bataille in his unwitting diagnosis of the
doxic assumption that underpins the Western sacrificial ontology. That is, the
understanding that: ‘human life is a trap’.
The “Post‐Mortem Condition”
Through the clinical composition of the shots and the chillingly ordered
modernist interiors, Pasolini creates a world in which no excess can lead to
transcendence. Naomi Greene comments that:
The world of Salò is one where everything is mathematically composed, geometrically balanced,
endowed with a precise function and meaning. Using metaphors drawn, significantly, from the
inorganic world, Pasolini noted that that he wanted Salò to be as exact and perfect as a “crystal,”
to have the “precision” of unreality (Greene 1990, 198).
This degree of precision forges an uncomfortable and unceasing disjuncture
between two levels of the film, in which the suffering and violence of the action is
represented through a freakishly mediated vision that rigorously opposes a
Bataillean aesthetics of sacrifice. Instead of a loss of form or identity in the
apexes of pain (Bataille 2006, 16), each image and movement seems to conform
to a mathematical necessity and discipline. Thus Gilles Deleuze writes that in
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Salò cinema becomes theorematic, as the movement of the camera itself follows
the deductive stages of thought: ‘Salò is a pure, dead theorem, a theorem of
death, as Pasolini wanted’ (Deleuze 1989, 169). This method seems to
deliberately and methodically work against any form of transcendence that could
be offered in negation. In its clinical portrayal of violence and death the camera
functions in a manner comparable to that of a coroner, who unfeelingly inspects
the materiality of the body.
To understand how such a technique operates it is necessary to analyse what is
perhaps the film’s most infamous scene. During ‘The Circle of Shit’, in which one
of the aged whores is theatrically narrating a story involving the practice of
coprophagy, the sobbing of the beautiful victim Renata causes an interruption. A
flat frontal shot gives us a close‐up of Renata’s face, distorted with anguish as she
weeps for the memory of her dead mother, her hands claw at her face and hair in
distress. The camera cuts to the Duc’s face, whose cool, calm gaze is directed at
her. In the extreme use of shot reverse shot, the camera gives only discontinuous
instants and frozen moments. It is in this sense that writing of Pasolini’s use of
montage, Deleuze argues that ‘montage has the property of “making the present
past”, in short of achieving time. It is useless for him (Pasolini) to add that this is
the operation of death, not a death that is over and done with, but a death in life,
or a being for death’ (Deleuze ibid., 34). Death is written into the structure and
movement of time in the film, but this intimacy does not enable a transcendent
transgression of the finite.
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Renata’s religious invocation “I beg you to have mercy on my suffering”, is met
with the cold inevitability of punishment. Renata will not die a martyr as she
hopes “Kill me! God will take pity on me!” but renounces all dignity and belief by
the end of the scene. Inspired by the ‘erotic’ story just told, the Duc has
something in the form of immediate retribution. Her desperation is met with
another shot of the Duc’s face as he barks for the collaborators to “Undress her
immediately”. Any hope of a redemptive sacrificial possibility is destroyed as the
camera slowly pans, following the Duc as he walks to the centre of the room, to
the end of the long dark ominous table that dissects the image. In contrast to the
earlier, frontal facial shots, the camera introduces a depth of field that focuses on
the Duc as he slowly unbuttons his trousers in the heavy silence of the room. The
dark polished wood of the table obscures him from the waist down. This is a
moment of deep suspense, but there is no moment of revelation. The camera cuts
to a profiled view of the Duc, revealing the faeces that he is carefully and
seriously depositing for Renata’s consumption. What is also interesting about
this shot is that the youths on the other side of the room are now included in our
field of vision. They lounge; impassive and bored, there is no frenzy of
excitement or loss of self, their slouch is expressive of a coincidence of the roles
of both spectator and victim. There seems to be a profound sense of detachment,
as if the capacity for affect has been annulled. Another slow lugubrious pan
across the room strangely builds tension. Renata says nothing as she crawls
naked and sobbing across the floor. The Duc offers her a spoon with which to eat
his excrement, and in the moment of no return, Renata feebly extends her arm to
receive the spoon. Their arms meet at a perfect ninety‐degree angle that slices
the screen, and is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s: The Creation of Adam. But
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unlike the divine moment that inaugurates life in the painting, this is the moment
that signals the presence of death in life: coprophagy. She offers no resistance
and begins to eat the faeces; the apex of abjection reveals nothing other than
itself. Thus Armando Maggi comments that in Salò: ‘“Shit” […] is the language of a
post‐mortem condition’ (Maggi 2009, 16). A condition in which bodies are no
longer immolated, but can only killed or treated as biological phenomena. The
camera cuts to the cold satisfied smile of the Duc, the piano player resumes her
sinister tunes, and the signora once again commences her tales of horror.
Through the bleak power of the image, the film realises the possibility that Nancy
argues was nascent in the thought of Bataille; the realisation that sovereignty is
nothing and subsequently that there is nothing which could be sacrificed to it.
Thus the limit of the hegemony of the sacrificial narrative in Western thought is
reached (Nancy, ibid., 31). This scene coldly answers the question that Nancy
poses:
How to think it, without the subject of the gaze having already appropriated, in himself, the
dialectic of the distraught and the ecstatic? How to think it, that is, without having fascination
constitute itself as mastery and dialectical knowledge of sacrifice’ (Nancy ibid., 27).
Voyeurism
In Salò the camera eye is not that which bears witness to the experience of
sacrifice; there is no loss of self in the erotic excess of sacrificial violence, as
Bataille would have it (2003,5). Instead, one is constantly made aware of the
precarious ethical position into which one is drawn simply by seeing. It is hard
not to admire the beauty of the shots, for the deep horror of the film is dispersed
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through its aesthetic appeal. At the same time, however, total absorption into the
purity of image and the pleasure of sight is forestalled and rendered impossible.
For in the very moment of aesthetic enjoyment one is simultaneously subject to a
painful self‐consciousness that is deeply terrifying. It is the fear of being a
voyeur, and the attendant complicity with the libertines that accompanies the act
of sight. Bersani and Dutoit note that:
What we recognise is nothing more than our pleasure at being carried along as spectators. It is as
if the ease with which we “go along” with Salo’s sadists included a folding movement of cognition
‐ a repliage which constitutes our simply recognizing that ease (Bersani and Dutoit 1982, 91).
The last scene exemplifies this double bind of sight perfectly. No justification
exterior to and for the act of sight exists. Forced to relinquish any claims as a
sacrificial vehicle, the gaze has no alternative but to fold back on itself. This fold
is exemplified in the savage removal of the eye that occurs in the last scene, as
we the spectators do nothing but watch.
The final scene in ‘The Circle of Blood’ has an unsettling quality that can be
attributed not so much to the content of the violence itself, but to the disturbing
filmic self‐reflexive commentary that disrupts the crescendo of cruelty that has
been anticipated and feared throughout the film.
From a throne placed in front of a window that looks out onto the courtyard of
torture, each of the four libertines take turns in watching the spectacular
carnival of violence through a pair of binoculars. As the Duc takes his seat the
curtains of the window are drawn aside, and both viewer and libertine are
prepared for the show, just as a hush descends in a theatre. He places the
binoculars in front of his eyes, and the viewer becomes eager for the cinematic
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convention of eye‐line matching to be followed, so that we may be party to the
obscured scene. Morbid curiosity is at its zenith, but as this filmic convention is
followed, it is also frustrated. For in following the Duc’s gaze, we realise that the
only possibility of vision is through the ocular apparatus that he holds to his face.
This is the operation of what Pasolini termed cinematic free indirect discourse:
‘the immersion of the filmmaker in the mind of his character and then the
adoption of the part of the filmmaker not only of the psychology of the character
but also his language’ (P. P. Pasolini 1988, 175). Through this technique viewer
and filmmaker are assimilated into the role of voyeur, a role emphasised by the
large proportion of the screen occupied by the frame of the binoculars that both
obscure and facilitate our vision.
From the vantage point high above the grotesque action below, one cannot hear
the screams of the victims or the words of the libertines. Instead there are close‐
ups of silent moving mouths, contrasted with what appears to be the non‐
diegetic sound that further detaches viewer from the action: the rumble of
distant planes is followed by Pound’s Cantos, then Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana1.
As the music reaches its height of darkness, one of the libertines is consumed in a
total incandescence of fury. He indiscriminately lashes out with his whip until
exhausted, and for a moment it seemed as if we were to witness an excess that
would pierce through the superabundance of mediating layers. But there is no
possibility for a forgetting that would enable one, blinded in a dizzying moment
of release, to feel that an outside of finitude had been reached by the sacrifice of
these victims. Whilst there is violence, there is no full disclosure of the moment
1 A cantata composed in 1937 and a great favourite of the National Socialists. 2 The location of a brutal massacre of civilians by the SS in 1944 in Northern Italy. 3 Due to this article’s epublication format it has no page numbers. 4 An important claim which, in itself, warrants fuller treatment elsewhere 5 (Agamben 2000, 7; Agamben 1998, 113)
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of death. Bataille’s understanding of sacrifice: ‘The victim dies and the spectators
share in what his death reveals […] Only a spectacular killing has the power to
reveal what normally escapes notice’ (Bataille 2006, 22) is thwarted here. Or
rather all that is revealed is the absence of revelation, and in this absence the
preconception that the moment of death is one of transcendence or escape is
exposed. A spectacular killing leads us only back to itself, and the conditions that
make it spectacular. Thus what appeared to us to be an atmospheric soundtrack
that enhanced the spectacle, an aid to the feast of horror, is shown to be an
illusory trick that through its disclosure as such actually inhibits the desired
amnesia of sacrifice. For one of the collaborators walks to the previously
concealed radio, and changes the frequency back to the music that opens the
film, a rendering of the 1940’s song These Foolish Things. Thus the viewer is
made aware of frustrated expectations, and subsequently feels somewhat foolish
as the two boys dance together to the aptly titled music. For it had felt (however
temporarily) in the use of non‐diegetic sound, that there was to be a rupture of
affect into what lies outside of the unbearable framed image. The use of the same
song for both the opening and finish of the film is a profoundly unsettling move;
because of the circularity of the timeless sentimental tune, we are left with a
feeling of deep emptiness. A sound bridge is created that leads nowhere. One
might have never bothered undergoing the ordeal of watching the film at all. For
nothing changed, there was no way out of the ‘trap’ of human life, and what
remains is only a vaguely soiled feeling of dissatisfaction. However, it is precisely
this feeling that opens thought and art onto new possibilities. For, as Nancy
argues ‘if sovereignty is nothing, if the “obscure God” is only the obscurity of
desire ecstatic in the face of itself, if existence arranges itself towards its own
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finitude, then we must think apart from sacrifice’ (Nancy, ibid.,35). In the film’s
frustration of any logic of sacrifice, that which had remained imperceptible to
thought, because it provided its ground, is rendered visible. Thus, understanding
Salò and the ‘theorem of death’ that animates it, may be an essential and difficult
stage in beginning to think life ‘apart from sacrifice’.
The “Unsacrificeable”
The presence of cubist art in the film can be seen to serve in the critique of the
sacrificial tradition that culminated in early twentieth‐century Western
aesthetics and thought. The murals, suggestive of Léger, reflect the manner in
which the human body is portrayed in the film. That is as objectified forms,
deprived of any individuating essence, in which the naked body is reduced to its
barest components. In the ‘best arse competition’ for instance, only the bottom,
bared and dehumanised through the objectifying gaze, is left exposed. No truth is
revealed; instead only the fact of the existence of the human is given, understood
through the biological universality of the anus. As the camera pans over the
darkened room, we may begin to understand what Nancy means when he writes
that: ‘Sacrifice would topple here, in silence, into a contrary that is also its
accomplishment: a revelation of horror with no access, no appropriation, only
with the revelation of itself, infinite, or rather indefinite’ (ibid., 32). What is
affirmed through the emphasis on the materiality of the body is the finitude of
existence, stripped of any universal essence with which it may be reconciled in
the act of sacrifice.
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Thus Nancy writes that after Bataille and the techniques of Auschwitz, we may
see that ‘Transgression trans‐appropriates nothing. Or rather, it appropriates
nothing but this: the victim as corpse, the charnel‐house heap’ (ibid., 34). This is
what is so fantastically disturbing about Salò, that ‘existence exposes being in its
essence, misappropriated of all essence, and thus of all “being”’ (ibid., 36).
Pasolini’s claim that: ‘so long as we live, we have no meaning’ (Pasolini 1988, 236–
7) may be understood not as a negation, but as ontological affirmation; the
absence of any essence is the condition for an assessment of life as
fundamentally “unsacrificeable”. Unsacrificability follows from the observation
that existence ‘cannot be returned to the trans‐appropriation of an essence. But
it is offered, that is to say, it is presented to the existence that is’ (Nancy, ibid.).
Life is “unsacrificeable” because it is already offered; this is the meaning of
finitude. But this offering is offered to nothing, for it is immanent to itself:
‘“Nothing” is not an abyss open to the outside. “Nothing” affirms finitude, and
this “nothing” at once returns existence to itself and to nothing else’ (ibid., 37).
Homo Sacer?
The problematic decision to set the novel in the fascist republic of Salò is yet to
be discussed. Details such as the use of two actresses of 1930’s cinema as
storytellers, the inclusion of the road sign of Marzabotto2, and the sound used in
the last scene, belie a puzzling effort to maintain a thread of historical continuity
with the fascist past. Alessia Ricciardi3 proposes a reading of the film that
accounts for the slippage in historical specificity. She argues that it be
2 The location of a brutal massacre of civilians by the SS in 1944 in Northern Italy. 3 Due to this article’s epublication format it has no page numbers.
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understood as a proleptic vision of Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of biopower4.
Biopower is defined as ‘the politicization of bare life as such’ (Agamben 1998, 4),
where bare life is understood as ‘Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death’
(ibid., 88). Agamben’s theory takes the concentration camp as its paradigm, and
the bare life of the camp as its subject. The choice of Salò as the setting for the
film is therefore understood to reflect fascism as the absolute instance of
biopower. However, as Ricciardi’s comparison with the recent photographic
evidence from Abu Ghraib is intended to demonstrate, biopower cannot be
localised to the spatio‐temporal event of the camp.
To understand Riccardi’s claim, we must note that Agamben5 and Nancy reject
Bataille’s thought of sacrifice for divergent reasons. For Agamben, existence
stripped of all attributes is bare life, the link that binds us to sovereignty. It is the
life of the homo sacer, where the sacred denotes not one who is offered in
sacrifice, but one: ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (Agamben,1998,8).
Thus he argues that:
It is Jean‐Luc Nancy’s achievement to have shown the ambiguity of Bataille’s theory of sacrifice,
and to have strongly affirmed the concept of an “unsacrificeable existence” against every
sacrificial temptation. Yet if our analysis of homo sacer is correct […] then the concept of the
“unsacrificeable” too must be seen as insufficient to grasp the violence at issue in modern
biopolitics. Homo sacer is unsacrificeable, yet he may nevertheless be killed by anyone’
(Agamben, ibid., 113).
In analysing Salò, Ricciardi therefore concurs that the victims are not and cannot
be sacrificed. But in its disclosure of the horror of the situation of homo sacer the
4 An important claim which, in itself, warrants fuller treatment elsewhere 5 (Agamben 2000, 7; Agamben 1998, 113)
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film acts as an apocalyptic testament to the ‘irresistible authoritarian oppression’
of sovereignty, that has as its ontological activity the production of bare life
(Ricciardi 2011; Agamben ibid., 6).
Technique
It is not the aim of the present discussion to determine whether Agamben’s
‘analysis of the homo sacer is correct’, although the legitimacy of this concept has
been questioned (Ojakangas 2005; Johan Van Der Walt 2005). What can be
explored, however, are the limitations that the employment of this term might
have on an understanding of life understood in relation to the film’s visualisation
of the end of sacrifice. In Ricciardi’s comparison of Salò to the photographs from
Abu Ghraib she opens her reading to a charge of equivocation that belies a more
serious problem created by reading it as an expression of Agamben’s paradigm
of biopower. It raises the question: does understanding the victims in the film as
homo sacer reinsert an essence to the bared existence that is represented? By
equivocating the film and the recent photographs, does she search for a trans‐
historical truth to existence that Agamben claims to disclose in his analysis of
sovereignty? In this sense her comparison performs an appropriation through
the closure of possibilities that is similar to the operation of a sacrificial logic. If
we follow Ricciardi’s reading of the film, then the only reaction available is one of
nihilistic despair at the essential situation of being ‘all virtually homines sacri’
(Agamben, ibid., 115). The termination of the sacrificial narrative could only
mean a revelation of finitude that is already defined by its subjection to an
irresistible sovereignty. However, elsewhere Ricciardi suggests Pasolini […]
stood for the future, albeit for a future achieved through apocalyptic
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lucidity’(Ricciardi 2011b, 17). But if the ‘future’ can be understood only in
apocalyptic and impossible terms, then it begins to function in a homologous
manner to the ‘Outside’ which Nancy identifies in his critique of sacrifice:
‘Western sacrifice is haunted by an Outside of finitude, as obscure and
bottomless as this “outside” may be […] But there is no “outside.” The event of
existence, the “there is,” means that there is nothing else’ (Nancy., 37). Whilst
Agamben has attempted to stress that the ‘Outside’ by which he defines
singularity is ‘not another space that resides beyond a determinate space, but
rather, it is the passage, the exteriority that gives it access’ (Agamben 2007, 67),
the homo sacer seems to entail nothing other than the hope for a messianic
opening onto an Outside of temporality rather than an experience of radical
finitude in the present. Agamben writes that ‘... the life that begins on earth after
the last day is simply human life’ (ibid., 6), but what of the life that is offered
before the last day? The definition of life as that of the homo sacer, as one who
may not be sacrificed but killed at any time, means that ‘life’ is not offered to
itself as Nancy suggests, but to the future of the ‘earth after the last day’. Until
then, the possibility of the good life and the agency that this entails are infinitely
suspended, as life is understood only in its proximity to imminent death or
transcendent future.
I suggest that the use of parody and dark humour in the film as a self‐reflexive
turn upon the cultural legacy of sacrifice is more akin to Nancy’s idea of
“technique” than an expression of despair at the unilateral power of sovereignty:
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technique is […] the event appropriating finite existence as such […] turning every possible mode
of appropriation back on itself and its own “one‐dimensionality,” it exposes at one stroke both
the question of finite existence and the question of its equally finite appropriation
(ibid., 1991, 34)
Thus the desacralisation of rites in metatheatrical performance, the presence of
mirrors in every scene, and the terrible jokes that follow every death, articulate a
vision that turns to look upon its own finitude and appropriates it as such,
without, however, searching for an Outside or an impossible future to the
mirthless comedy of the situation. In contrast to Ricciardi’s analysis, viewing the
film in terms of technique may enable an understanding of Salò as a visualisation
of the end of sacrifice that constitutes an engagement with the present; a present
that has yet to be appropriated in terms of an impossible future or an essential
truth. The hollow laughter of the film may then be understood as an expression
of the nothingness of existence, which nonetheless, and thereby, affirms finitude,
meaning that ‘there is room to give meaning to the infinite absence of appropriable
meaning’ (Nancy, ibid.).
Conclusion
To look unflinchingly at what has such a long and prestigious legacy of
concealment may be a supremely difficult task, but it is one that the techniques
of the Shoah have compelled us to carry out, for as Agamben notes: ‘There is no
return from the camps to classical politics’ (1998, 188). Salò’s achievement is to
force a confrontation with the finitude of existence, stripped of any essence that
could be re‐appropriated through sacrificial transcendence. What the film
demonstrates is the impossibility of a politics or aesthetics that remains
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grounded in a sacrificial model. This has been argued by attending to those
features that work against the ascription of any essence to life, or any Outside of
finitude that could be reached through sacrifice. Salò presents a vision of the
possibility of existence in its ultimate negativity; yet I have argued that this does
not necessitate an understanding of the film as a condemnation of life in thrall to
sovereign power. To read the film in this manner is to recuperate existence
under an essence of political ontology, an essence with a potential for
transformation of the present which lies only in an impossible future. Just as
sacrifice has prevented engagement with the present, so Ricciardi’s reading
seems to perpetuate the same mistakes, albeit in a modified form. If considered
seriously, the image of the worst may provoke attempts to create alternative
forms of an existence that has been freed from the spectre of its transcendence.
This is precisely the effect that the film had on Foucault, who in derision and
disdain said of Salò: ‘
Are we unable to think the intensity of the present except as the end of the world in a
concentration camp? You see how poor our treasure of images really is! And how urgent it is to
fabricate another’ (Foucault 1998b, 226).
To gaze at the intolerable presented by Salò is to task ourselves with the
avoidance of its bare repetition. This is why I have suggested that we reconsider
Nancy’s notion of “technique” in relation to certain tropes and techniques
utilised in the film, for: ‘The technique of the camps is doubtless one possibility
of technique, but it is also its sacrificial possibility’ (Nancy,ibid.,34). Salò’s
brilliance lies in its demonstration of the difficulty and necessity of learning to
think both after and beyond the myth of sacrifice.
Romy Opperman
19
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