Levi's Guilt

 Please follow the link for a sneak preview: http://mubi.com/films/532

As a future reference to any interested party I would like to suggest Pasolini's 1975 controversial film Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom based on a book of the same title by the Marquis de Sade. 

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . it’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century opus of torture and degradation to 1944 Fascist Italy remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in. —The Criterion Collection

Salò stands, in my opinion, at the intersection of many of the "typologies of violence" we have discussed throughout the course, and from this point of view it provides a complex and hybrid ambiance for an understanding which is plural, interdisciplinary, and informative of possible overlaps between genres of violence. 

The movie provides us with a context within which to examine the relationship between the physical and visible coercion on bodies versus the subjective violence, which according to Zizek, is violence which is performed by a clearly identifiable human agent. Or to identify, as we may at 02:25, the overlap between ideological and symbolic violence: "I think that we Fascists represent the only true complete anarchism on earth once we have taken control of the state. In fact the only real anarchism is that of power." The movie is  difficult to watch, but what we name controversial, is in fact the dialectics of violence entering into a debate with one another. Here in we shall find the true gender of the State: it has the head of a man, the body of a woman - a mythic creature in its own right - a sadomasochistic entity fed by gross pain. But its violent behavior, as it alternates between the ethical, the everyday, and the disciplinary; produces the structural violence, on the one hand, the liberational violence, on the other. 

Violence's ability of shape-shifting as stated by Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois (2004), is explored by Pasolini in the same spirit, only that in his work art is celebrated for it's ability to attack and expose violence by turning a mirror upon itself. The exaggeration is so intense that the reflection we get is an amorphism. Devoid of form, violence is to be understood as plural, non-linear, subjugative; transcending and traversing the isomorphic habitus.   

Judith Butler's contribution through her reading of Primo Levi's account of the year he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz, offers another insight to our own effort of making sense: inside Auschwitz prisoners were convinced of a guilt designating their common fate. A guilt over a crime that was never committed, never defined, and never stated. I believe that to be a condition set inside any form of abusive relationship, whether we are examining couples of race, gender, sex, class, ethnicity etc. Or if you like, guilt, is power's toe. 

Can there be such a thing as a non-pervasive, non-corruptive power? What happens to our agency under submission? Violence has been presented as a prerequisite of order and balance and Salò gives us a glimpse of what that world looks like when all genres of violence are densely concentrated. What would the opposite world look like? A non-violent world implies the eradication of all forms of power as well. For sure we would call it a Utopia. Linguistics aside, what would it look like? As creative minds we are much more adept to imagine spaces of Armageddon, but we lack the skills to envision inclusive spaces of Paradise: we are torn by our self-righteous ethics and our rivalry gods. Is it perhaps that our awareness, our consciousness and our sensibility are founded on victimage? Are we not, after all, permanently attached to a food-chain standing, as we do, between the mightier and weaker?

< I <.... the fish eats the fish eats the fish ad infinitum... And when we yield to this logic we surrender our will, that is to say, our power. The order that results out of violence, is the order of a conditioned agency: we make sense of who we are through the restraints applied upon us. From this point of view, it matter's little if we live in a liberal democracy, in a fundamentalist autocracy, in a military oligarchy. We are divided only by our ability to comprehend and take on different types of power, and therefore, exercise different forms of violence on each other.