So What, or How to Make Films with Words by García Düttmann Alexander;

Author:García Düttmann, Alexander;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northwestern University Press

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How does the end of culture relate to what remains of culture, how does its guilt relate to an innocence? Perhaps only an innocence can relate to a guilt, an innocence that no longer stands in opposition to guilt without thereby ceasing to be innocence. If this innocence stood in opposition to guilt, it could no longer relate to it, since it would lose its innocence through this relation. When Barthes speaks of Pasolini’s “naïveté,” this is the kind of innocence he must have in mind. As an artist, Pasolini can only relate to the guilt of culture, capture it on film, show culture’s complicity with subjugation, power, violence, the bloody end of bourgeois capitalist society, and the endgame of culture in fascism, to the extent that the innocence in his “naïveté” allows him to do so, even if it means that he may miss the essence of Sadism and fascism. That one is stricken with an unshakable guilt upon seeing Salò, that one leaves the cinema with the impression of having always been guilt-stricken and having denied it in vain, that the guilt captured by Salò is whole and entire, not a euphemistically reduced guilt, that this guilt is the most impenetrable and unbearable imaginable, which is why the film is mistaken for this guilt and experienced as unacceptably insidious—all this attests to the element of innocence in Pasolini’s “naïveté.” But Sade too must have something of this innocence as a writer if his novels of criminal excess can be read as an “anticipatory historiography,” as Horkheimer and Adorno claim, a historiography that draws the consequences from its insight into the “identity of power and reason.”19 And even the audacious, delusional, sacrilegious, apparently insane attempt of libertinism to arrive, through an increase in guilt, at an innocence beyond guilt and innocence, would be unthinkable if such an innocence did not already dwell within it, be it merely as a phantasm produced by guilt or by the confusion arising from guilt. Whether guilty or not, culture ultimately takes on traits of an innocence beyond guilt and innocence at the moment it is placed—as Serra seems to place it—in relation to what comes after culture, sealing its failure and its guilt, namely the barbarism that can never be brought to cultural presence in the first place.

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