Carlo Ginzburg
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195394337
- eISBN:
- 9780199777358
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195394337.003.0014
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This chapter deals with the relationship between Eliade’s political commitment and Eliade’s work as a historian of religions, focusing on The Myth of the Eternal Return, probably his most interesting ...
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This chapter deals with the relationship between Eliade’s political commitment and Eliade’s work as a historian of religions, focusing on The Myth of the Eternal Return, probably his most interesting work. Eliade’s Lisbon Journal provides a context for the central theme of The Myth of the Eternal Return: the terror (or rejection) of history. The chapter argues that this theme and its implications throw much light on Eliade’s paradoxically ambivalent legacy.Less
This chapter deals with the relationship between Eliade’s political commitment and Eliade’s work as a historian of religions, focusing on The Myth of the Eternal Return, probably his most interesting work. Eliade’s Lisbon Journal provides a context for the central theme of The Myth of the Eternal Return: the terror (or rejection) of history. The chapter argues that this theme and its implications throw much light on Eliade’s paradoxically ambivalent legacy.
Ramsey McGlazer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286591
- eISBN:
- 9780823288809
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286591.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade set in the fascist Salò Republic. Challenging a critical tendency ...
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This chapter revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade set in the fascist Salò Republic. Challenging a critical tendency to see the film as forward-looking or indeed “prophetic,” the chapter attends to Pasolini’s complex and abiding engagements with the past. These include, the chapter argues, engagements with the obsolete forms of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as mere “instruction.” Salò redeploys these forms as it constructs and compels viewers to inhabit an old school. For Pasolini—whose film was, he said, “conceived as a rite”—the painful, ritual re-enactment of the past becomes a means of countering the collective forgetting of fascism and an alternative to fascism’s remaining “real.” Schooling spectators in what Ernesto De Martino calls the salience of the “bad past that returns,” Pasolini refuses the postwar imperative to disavow the fascist past, to render it a mere “parenthesis.” He draws not only on Sade’s “school for libertinage,” but also on the long-discounted techniques of “instruction” in order to insist that any move beyond fascism must proceed from reckoning with it, not denial. The capacity for this reckoning is what Salò seeks to impart.Less
This chapter revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade set in the fascist Salò Republic. Challenging a critical tendency to see the film as forward-looking or indeed “prophetic,” the chapter attends to Pasolini’s complex and abiding engagements with the past. These include, the chapter argues, engagements with the obsolete forms of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as mere “instruction.” Salò redeploys these forms as it constructs and compels viewers to inhabit an old school. For Pasolini—whose film was, he said, “conceived as a rite”—the painful, ritual re-enactment of the past becomes a means of countering the collective forgetting of fascism and an alternative to fascism’s remaining “real.” Schooling spectators in what Ernesto De Martino calls the salience of the “bad past that returns,” Pasolini refuses the postwar imperative to disavow the fascist past, to render it a mere “parenthesis.” He draws not only on Sade’s “school for libertinage,” but also on the long-discounted techniques of “instruction” in order to insist that any move beyond fascism must proceed from reckoning with it, not denial. The capacity for this reckoning is what Salò seeks to impart.
