e-flux_Pasolini
BAD NERVES
‘Open call: monument to Pasolini’, issued by e-flux in 2025, directs us to the concluding phase of the author’s work. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of his death, we dwell on its circumstances, in conjunction with Salò and his later writings for Corriere della Sera. These form a unity, distinct from the biography and oeuvre preceding them.[i]
This intersection of life, work and political milieu resonates with us, a new reality born of a traumatic rupture. Hence, it is understandable that e-flux write of a “prophecy”. Pasolini joins the list of twentieth-century writers looked to for portents and analogies in the twenty-first: Gramsci, Spengler, Lovecraft…
Yet Salò and Pasolini’s later journalism were not about the future any more than the recent, fascist, past.[ii] Rather, they concerned the transformation wrought by consumerism – the “new fascism” – in Italy in the decade preceding Pasolini’s death.
As suggested in Zuboff and Dystopia, Pasolini’s reference to a “mutation” in the order of things offers an alternative to the notion of evolutionbroached by e-flux. Rather than a linear, quantitative development from late twentieth-century consumerism to the “networked” present, the concept of mutation invites comparison of two distinct phenomena across time. Indeed, Zuboff’s take on the latter is notable for the contingency identified with its development: “surveillance capitalism” is the offspring of an unforeseeable horror – 9/11 – rather than logics inherent either to capitalism or technology.
CTAH envisages a compendium of “bad nerves”, as accumulated since the death of Pasolini, “recordings” across media where emotion and event retain their initial connections, prior to the curation and attachment of approved associations down the line.
Against the perpetual present of Olivia Laing,[iii] for whom the Italian Social Republic, postwar consumerism and contemporary populism are interchangeable, we borrow methodologically from Pasolini, working backwards in discrete segments of time – a year, five years, a decade – to distinguish each successive rupture and shock to the system.
Such an approach constitutes a “monument as a medium of critique rather than commemoration” in the sense perhaps intended by e-flux. Commemoration courts reaction – simply to extrapolate Pasolini’s theses into the present renders Michel Houellebecq his legitimate heir. A quarter century of commemoration lies behind us. It would seem reasonable, now, to question formulaic antimodernism.
e-flux_Pasolini © Shivdeep Grewal 2026
[i] Agamben, G. (2017) “Giorgio Agamben ci racconta Pasolini: l’anarchia del potere, la scomparsa delle lucciole”, Città Pasolini, 25 November 2017, available at: https://www.cittapasolini.com/post/giorgio-agamben-pasolini-intervista?mibextid=Zxz2cZ (accessed 18 October 2025).
Powers, J. (1998) “Salò”, The Criterion Collection, 21 July 1998, available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/35-salo (accessed 19 October 2025).
[ii] Agamben, G. (2017) “Giorgio Agamben ci racconta Pasolini: l’anarchia del potere, la scomparsa delle lucciole”, Città Pasolini, 25 November 2017, available at: https://www.cittapasolini.com/post/giorgio-agamben-pasolini-intervista?mibextid=Zxz2cZ (accessed 18 October 2025).
Powers, J. (1998) “Salò”, The Criterion Collection, 21 July 1998, available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/35-salo (accessed 19 October 2025).
[iii] Laing, O. (2025) “What did Pasolini know? Fifty years after his brutal murder, the director’s vision of fascism is more urgent than ever”, The Guardian, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/01/what-did-pasolini-know-fifty-years-after-his-brutal-the-directors-vision-of-fascism-is-more-urgent-than-ever (accessed 24 October 2026).