Federico Luisetti

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Political Animism1

One can move from reality to a dream: but it is

impossible to move from a dream to another dream.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, trans. by Ann Goldstein

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 51.

In discussing Pasolinis unfinished posthumous novel Petrolio, in her chapter Pasolini for the
Anthropocene, Karen Pinkus shows how climate change and the environmental crisis belong to
the same epistemic landscape of Petrolios cosmic-pornographic visions.2 According to
Pinkus, Pasolini profoundly anticipates the Anthropocene in his unfinished work titled,
precisely, for one of the two major fossil fuels, Petrolio.3 The Anthropocene, as Pasolinis
fragmentary work, evokes a history beyond our comprehension a time in which the archaic and
the actual, nature and history, the immemorial underworld and contemporary neo-capitalism,
ungovernable matter and geopolitical forces enter into unprecedented relations and produce
disturbing assemblages.4

1
Draft. Forthcoming in The Legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited by Luca Peretti and Karen Raizen, Bloomsbury,
2017.
2
See, in this volume, pages ?.
3
Ibid., ? The term Anthropocene describes the geological epoch of the Quaternary Period that follows the Holocene,
our current age during which humans are a force shaping the Earth and their actions a natural phenomenon. This
geological term has come into use by a large community of scholars in the humanities and social sciences,
promoting a widespread debate that is reconfiguring the distribution of human and natural forms of agency and
animation.
4
On Pasolini and fossil fuels, see also Karen Pinkus, Fuel. A Speculative Dictionary (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2016), 61: In its unyielding writing-to-come, Petrolio is the greatest, most emblematic, modern
work around fuel. On Pasolini and ecology see Serenella Iovinos chapter Unecologia della differenza. Cultura e
1
Most interpretations of Petrolio have focused on its explicit contentstate-sponsored violence,
the obscure force of sexuality and mythand literary formallegorical motifs, meta-narrative
experimentalism.5 Because of Petrolios grandiosity and self-definition as a poem, this
posthumous text has been regarded as an odd Gesamtkunstwerk, a late example of European
modernism, a catalogue of the counter-culture of the Sixties and early Seventies. Yet, the
disturbing consistence of Petrolios bodies, things, metamorphoses and visions can hardly be
contained by the familiar discourse of literary influence and aesthetic modernism.
Petrolios naturalized history, the unleashing of mythic violence and archaic rituals, the
metamorphosis of humans into uncanny monsters, point towards an apocalyptic mutation of
capitalism and exhaustion of humanism. In his posthumous work, through a vertiginous
fragmentation and resistance to the constraints of the bourgeois novel, Pasolini not only
anticipates some of our contemporary preoccupationsthe centrality of oil, debates on
ancestrality in speculative realism, the return of animism in postcolonial anthropologiesbut
also disrupts our peaceful understanding of history and the literary field.

My hypothesis is that the irrational texture claimed by Pasolinis cinema of poetry, its
programmatic lack of a vocabulary of concepts and philosophical clarity, is the atmosphere of
his posthumous novel, what we may call, with Bruno Latour, his Dingpolitik. Petrolios ghostly
characters recall Latours assembly of demons that interrupt historical progress and turn nature
into a pandemonium, populated by an array of non-modern subjects and enigmatic quasi-
objects.6
Petrolios demoniac technique extends to literature Pasolinis reflections on the double
nature and irrational, oneiric, elementary, and barbaric elements of audiovisual
communication.7 Petrolio, like Pasolinis late cinema, is a hypnotic monstrum.8 Once we

paesaggio in Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Ecologia letteraria. Una strategia di sopravvivenza (Milano: Edizioni
Ambiente, 2015).
5
An example of this tendency are the essays collected in Carla Benedetti and Maria Antonietta Grignani, eds., A
partire da Petrolio. Pasolini interroga la letteratura (Ravenna: Longo, 1995).
6
Bruno Latour, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik An Introduction to Making Things Public, in Bruno Latour &
Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 15.
7
Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. By Ben Lawton
and Louise K. Barnett (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2005), 173. On Pasolinis vitalist approach to
cinema, bio-aesthetic paradigm, and influence on Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, I follow the perspective
introduced by Davide Luglio in the unpublished essay, Lo scandalo del neutro.
2
grasp this visual matrix of Petrolio, we can address the Anthropocenic territory of the novel and
realize how Pasolini has explored, beyond Foucaults biopower, a new form of power, for which
what matters is not the difference between life and death but the articulation of life and non-life,
the human and the non-human.
In his essay The Cinema of Poetry, Pasolini opposes the historicity of verbal communication to
the pre-grammaticality of objects, distinguishing the language of prose and linguistic signs
from the language of poetry, the conventionalism of written communication from the
immemorial, pre-human realm of images, the mute chaos of things:

while the instrumental communication which lies at the basis of poetic and
philosophical communication is already extremely elaborateit is, in other words, a real,
historically complex and mature systemthe visual communication which is the basis of
film language in, on the contrary, extremely crude, almost animal-like. As with gestures
and brute reality, so dreams and the processes of our memory are almost prehuman
events, or on the border of what is human. In any case, they are pregrammatical and even
premorphological.9

Bodies, dreams, memories, objectsincluding those short-lived things without etymology that
are industrial products and the phantasms of natureare endowed with a limited historical density
and possess only a weak grammatical articulation. For this reason, non-verbal reality can be
expressed by visual communication, through a poetic style that does not rely on the grammatical
formalism and narrative structures of written language. For Pasolini, the im-signs (image-
signs) of cinema, the images extracted from the insensitive chaos of objects are always
concrete.10 Despite any literary and communicative convention, cinema is not a continuation of
literature but of the language of human actions that we find in reality.11 We can thus speak of
cinema semiotically only assuming the radically split perspective, realistic and visionary, that
reality is, in the final analysis, nothing more than cinema in nature.12 Things, bodies, rituals are

8
Ibid., 172.
9
Ibid., 169.
10
Ibid., 171.
11
Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Written Language of Reality, in Heretical Empiricism,199.
12
Ibid., 198
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forms of action found in reality. The total language of action of reality is the foundational
vocabulary and monstrous grammar of cinema. The expressive violence and oneiric
physical quality of cinematic images are a characteristic of the im-signs, shared with the
language of dreams and visions.13
Pasolinis intuition of the immediate coincidence of reality and images leads to his
hallucinated realism and triggers several fractures, beginning with the divergence of the
subjective and objective nature of the im-signs. While the images of objects and gestures are
purely external, brutally realistic, the images of memories and dreams are utterly subjective.14
These two aspects of cinematic images are simultaneous and intertwined, a double nature; they
are two moments of the analysis that are not separable even in the laboratory.15 It would be
erroneous to identify different kinds of im-signs: each image is at the same time an instance of
the communication with ourselves and with others, a hybrid that lacks a conventional, logical
and historical articulation.
If we compare Pasolinis early literary productionhis neorealist novels and poetry of the Fifties
and early Sixitieswith Petrolios uncanny experimentalism, we can detect the impact of his
meditations on the pre-grammaticality and pre-humanity of things and images. Petrolios
visions, dreams and temporal fusions disregard the enclosure of literary norms, the novels
history and restrictions, and deploy the stylistic barbarism of the cinema of poetry, staging
uncoordinated mythological excerpts.16

Pasolinis reflection on cinema grants a privilege to the translation of literatures free indirect
discourse to film technique. Petrolio performs a parallel but inverted gesture, translating the
double nature of visual images into the doubles of his novel: the coincidence of cinema and
13
The Cinema of Poetry, 172. In a series of ambitious semiotic articles (The Written Language of Reality, The
Theory of Splices, The Rheme), Pasolini specifies in what sense a language of cinema does exist, although the code
of reality and the code of the audio-visual signs coincide, The Rheme, in Heretical Empiricism, 290. Although
reality and cinema are continuous and coincide, each film is a succession of shots linked by splices, a succession of
spatiotemporal inclusions and exclusions. Inspired by the semiotics of Charles Peirces and Metz and Barthes ,
Pasolini formalizes the analysis and decoding if the language of film through a vocabulary of, simultaneous,
physiopsychological (seme), audio-visual (kineme), and spatiotemporal (rhythmeme) signs (ibid., 291).
14
In short, cinema, or the language of im-signs, has a double nature: it is both extremely subjective and extremely
objective, The Cinema of Poetry, 173.
15
Ibid.
16
This perspective allows us to understand Pasolinis rejection of the literary formalism of the neo-Avant-gardes, his
reinvention of the political realism and language of action of the historical Avant-gardes, and his fascination for the
documentary techniques and nonmodern subjects of the ethnographic cinema of Jean Rouch.
4
reality is achieved in Petrolio by challenging the literary constraints of the novel. Pasolini
explains in a letter to Moravia that Petrolio its a novel, but its not written the way/real/novels
are written.17 While conventional novels are narrative machines, games in which the narrator
abolishes the author and captures the reader in a world of illusions, Pasolini has no further
desire to play.18 He thus abolishes the distance between the novel and the reader, speaking to
the reader as myself, in flesh and bone and not obeying the laws of a language that would
secure for it the necessary distance from me.19
In Oedipus Rex, Theorem, Pigsty, and Medea the pre-grammatical nature of film reality and the
absence of a formalized code of the im-signs generate a polarized language of dreams and naked
reality. Analogously, the deconstruction of the unified milieu of the socio-psychological realistic
novel unleashes Petrolios divided nature. Petrolio is a novel and un poema: a text, or better a
bloc of signs20 that is both and at the same time reifiedI have made the novel an object
between the reader and me,21 something written22and connected to the subjectivity of the
author a personal account, a poem, as I write you this letter.23 To this bifurcation, other
uncanny separations and compositions follow: metafictional digressions and crude visions,
literary parodies and story-telling, hyper-narrative tales and hypo-narrative journalistic reports.
The nature of the protagonist of Petrolio, Carlo, mirrors this technique. This split engineer
emerges from the schizoid dissociation that divides a person in two,24 in a scene in which an
angelic creature and an infernal deity, Polis and Tetis, argue over the property of Carlos body.
Carlos the First is a bourgeois engineer who works at the top levels of the principal Italian state
oil company, ENI. Carlo the Second (or Karl as he is called at times), is his perfect double, a
sex-thirsty servant who, protected by solitude succeeds in degrading himself without any
limits.25
The story of Carlo advances thorough separations and exchanges, fueled by mythic violence,
incestuous relationships with his mother, sisters, grandmother, and servants, and infernal

17
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, trans. by Ann Goldstein (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), xi.
18
Ibid., xii.
19
Ibid., xi.
20
Ibid., 403.
21
Ibid., xii.
22
Ibid., 129.
23
Ibid., xi.
24
Ibid., xiv.
25
Ibid., xiv-xv. Carlo is also Pasolinis father name, and his age is the same as Pasolinis.
5
encounters. On the balcony of his Rome apartment, in May of 1960, all of a sudden Carlo sees
his own body fall.26 He then observes his abandoned body, a body deprived of
consciousness, lying supine at his feet.27 The two nonhuman characters, Tetis and Polis, in a
visionlike dream,28 arrive beside the supine body and argue for its ownership. Pasolini draws
his narrative under mythical clouds,29 in the light of the myth, which gives the impression
that the past has miraculously reappeared.30
Vision after vision, oneiric realism and mythical resonances give rise to the optical landscape of
the novel, in which linguistics patterns function as movable elements of a visual literary
machine: the actions of Carloas if seen by a spy, who reports without judging;31 the
digression on the Argonautsa series of visions reconstructed on the Myth of the Journey as
initiation;32 the Mystery of the medieval gardenan hallucination, in which also the garden
is doubled and divinities and idols are summoned from fourteenth century Italian painting;33 the
twenty six sections of the Vision Scene of the Shit, etc.
The double nature of images presides over Carlos incessant metamorphoses. As in Note 51, the
first fundamental moment of the poem,34 where Carlos surgical gaze contemplates his
transmuted body:

He went straight to his room and undressed, looking at himself in the big plain mirror
<> of virile intimacy. Suddenly he saw what had happened to him. Two large breasts
no longer younghung from his chest; and below his belly there was nothing; the hair
between his legs had disappeared, and only by touching it and pulling apart the lipsdid

26
Ibid., 5.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid., 6.
29
Ibid., 9.
30
Ibid., 10. The monstrous double nature reified and animated, mythical and existential of Pasolinis characters
resonate with Espositos account, in Le persone e le cose, of the archaic and postmodern encounter of persons that
are not persons anymore with things that are not things anymore, Roberto Esposito, Le persone e le cose (Torino:
Einaudi, 2014), 102, my translation.
31
Petrolio, 31.
32
Ibid., 116.
33
Ibid., 211.
34
Ibid., 162,
6
 Carlo, with the clear gaze of one who from his experience as an outlaw has learned the
philosophy of the poor, see the little fold that was his new sex.35
Petrolios vision-based narrative has found a method for transposing to literature the scandalous
essence of the im-signs, captured by Pasolini in the realm of audiovisual communication. The
double is not for Pasolini a psychoanalytic, religious, philosophical, or ideological theme but a
semiotic presupposition, the polarized structure of images that discloses the reality of a new form
of power. The thematic series of sexual debasement (Carlos wild encounters) and political
scheming (Carlos social climbing) converge in the appearance, after the excessive and
rough sexual performances of Note 55 (The field beside Via Casilina), of the subterranean
Gods Demons belonging to an Inferno where the damned atone, the Gods of Anthropocenic
capitalism36.
The unfinished Second Part of Petrolio, consisting of just a few notes, develops the political
bloc of the novel, and splits again the plot into two segments: in Bloc I, Carlo becomes
unconsciously an active member of a political conspiracy; in Bloc II, Carlo participates
hallucinatorily to state-sponsored terrorist violence, making the in fact visionary bomb
explode at the Turin station.37 Pasolini summaries the previous something written of the First
Part as the tale of a genocide carried out by those in Power against the working class and
therefore the poor.38 The anthropological transformation of Italy, the imposition of new
Models,39 is overlapped with a detailed description of the History and background of the oil
problem.40 These pages map the empire of Troya alias Eugenio Cefis, the vice-president of
ENI, illustrating in detail his biography, the architecture of power and corruption of Cefis and his
business/political network. We also learn of the intersection/initiation of Carlo into capitalist
power, the crossroads connecting the Signora F.s salonwhere the action will switch, when
Carlo attends a partywith the petrolchemical subsidiaries of ENI, and we become familiar
with the facts concerning business affairs, interests, intrigues, patronage,41 the political

35
Ibid., 162-163.
36
Ibid., 195.
37
Ibid., 98. Insert Cefiss speeches, which serve to divide the novel into two parts in a perfectly symmetrical and
explicit way, ibid., 98.
38
Ibid., 403.
39
Ibid., 403.
40
Ibid., 97.
41
Ibid., 98.
7
conspiracy and neofascist bombs accompanying the rise to power of Cefis, the plotting by
provocateurs and spies, and the suppression of Enrico Mattei, the president of ENI before
Cefis.42

In the few notes of the Second Part, the separation of State power into hallucinatory and
historical violence, converges in the vision of a cosmic crisis: Cosmic crisis (end of oil, water,
air).43 Pasolini describes an Anthropocenic conjuncture, triggered by the dissemination of fossil
fuels and nuclear waste; a present Inferno repeated by demons that are visiting the earth.
Arriving, these Gods see the new face of the disfigured, polluted earthwater, animals,
vegetation, wastes <?> and plutonium dumpsthermonuclear power plant funereal monuments
(in addition to the twisted ruins of everything having to do with oil, from refineries to gas station
attendants).44 Pasolinis post-apocalyptic tone and emotional detachment from this disfigured
and polluted earth are in contrast with the redemptory style of most climate change activism and
Anthropocenic millenarism.45 Petrolios cruel Gods live in a suspended time, in which the
naturalization of the Anthropos caused by environmental devastation has been already
accomplished, and no impatient Gaia is threatening human destiny. The travelling Gods are
demoniac tourists returning to a familiar, non-historical landscape.46

The cosmic crisis of Part Second reprises, folding it into a mythological dimension, the
historical labyrinth sketched out by the documentary digression on ENI and Cefis.47 This crucial
hinge of Petrolio, which, not surprisingly, is located at the junction of the two main parts of the
novel, allows us to draw some preliminary conclusions on the specific Pasolinian understanding
of the Anthropocene. The gathering of political massacres, industrial development and natural
42
This statement by Pasolini, and his suggested connections between Cefiss career and terrorist violence, may have
caused Pasolinis assassination. The disappearance of Note 21 of Petrolio (Flashes of light on ENI) is also, most
likely, related to Pasolinis death/assassination.
43
Ibid., 405.
44
Footnote to the Cosmic crisis, ibid., 405.
45
See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Dborah Danowski, Larrt de monde, in De l'univers clos au monde infini,
ed. Emilie Hache (Paris: Editions Dehors, 2014).
46
In a final plan of the unfinished novel, the cosmic crisis is resolved by peasant gods, that witness the crisis of
the peasant world, Petrolio, 464. A procession takes place in an anthropocenic landscape, through a country
landscape surrounding a nuclear power plant graveyard, ibid., 464.
47
According to one of Pasolinis summaries, Notes 20 to 30 were supposed to address the history and background
of the oil problem, ibid., 97. The existing pages, from Note 20 to 23, cast light on Carlos historical life, his leap
forward into the power structure and intricate ramifications of the empire of Troya.
8
apocalyptic upheavals,48 of historical and mythical reality,49 makes Petrolio a stereoscopic
device for observing the Anthropocene beyond the conventional framework of nature and
culture, archaic ritualism and contemporary politics, human death and cosmic life, fictional
storytelling and petrified forms.
Pasolinis blendingas in the double nature of the im-signsof the environmental wasteland
visited by the gods and the most ancient mythic descent into hell,50 allows him and his initiated
reader to discover a key feature of capitalistic power, an aspect revealed by the cosmic crisis:
beyond the brutal accumulation mechanisms of political economy and the sovereign architecture
of juridical modes of governance, beyond biopolitical norms and their regulation centered on life
and vitality, another formation of power is at work. Elizabeth A. Povinelli has proposed for this
epistemic and political arrangement the term geontopower, theorizing an exercise of power
that has at its core the production, governance, and policing of the difference between Life and
Nonlife, bios and geos, animation and inertia.51 The extraction of value from populations and the
Earth, with the support of biological, statistical, and geophysical sciences, presupposes a rigid
differentiation and functional articulation of Life and the Lifeless. The Anthropocene is the age
in which the structural mechanisms of geontopower are maintained, while at the same time the
radical environmental crises and biotechnological innovations of late liberalism are putting
pressure on the ontological distinctions among biological, geological, and meteorological
existents.52
As in Petrolios assemblage of fossil fuels and wounded bodies, mythological creatures and
capitalist monsters, in the Anthropocene Life and Nonlife are still separated, and yet their self-
evident distinction53 has lost its clarity. In this landscape, which corresponds to Pasolinis vision
of a cosmic crisis in which undead gods visit a barren Earth empty of vital resources(end of
oil, water, air).the inert Desert with its imaginary of species extinction, and the Animist with

48
Ibid., 463.
49
Ansyrma, the ancient religious ritual of exposing of the genitals for apotropaic purposes, which Pasolini
mentions as a resolution to the cosmic crisis.
50
An Alexandrian myth that reproduces deeds occurred in the classical world, which reworks a primitive myth,
ibid., 462-463.
51
See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016).
52
Ibid., 14.
53
Ibid.
9
his ability to see and bring animation into any form of being,54 are key governing ghosts,
political demons not bound by the partition of Life and Nonlife, the contemporary and the
archaic.

In his 1975 lectures at the College de France entitled Society must be defended, Michel
Foucault began his exploration of biopower. It is interesting to observe how 1975 is also the year
of Pasolinis death, which marked the end of his exploration, through the hallucinatory method
of Petrolio, of capitalisms political animism.

54
Capitalism has a unique relation to the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus insofar Capitalism sees all things as
having the potential to create profit; that is, nothing is inherently inert, everything is vital from the point of view of
capitalization, and anything can become something more with the right innovative angle. Indeed, capitalists can be
said to be the purest of the Animists, ibid., 20.
10