Pasolini

Poet,
novelist, dramatist, polemicist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini
continues to be one of the most influential intellectuals of post-war
Italy. InPasolini: The Sacred Flesh,
Stefania Benini examines his corporeal vision of the sacred, focusing
on his immanent interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the
Incarnation and the "sacred flesh" of Christ in both Passion and Death
as the subproletarian flesh of the outcast at the margins of capitalism.

By
investigating the many crucifixions within Pasolini's poems, novels,
films, cinematic scripts and treatments, as well as his subversive
hagiographies of criminal or crazed saints, Benini illuminates the
radical politics embedded within Pasolini's adoption of Christian
themes. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Ernesto De Martino,
Mircea Eliade, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj
Zizek, she shows how Pasolini's meditation on the disappearance of the
sacred in our times and its return as a haunting revenant, a threatening
disruption of capitalist society, foreshadows current debates on the
status of the sacred in our postmodern world.