ARTICOLI / 5 / Viola Brisolin /
This article investigates the relations between subjective autonomy and the symbolic order – between the truth of the subject and the dimension of power – in Pasolini’s late work, and in particular in the collection of poetry L’hobby del sonetto. The latter is read in dialogue with Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux and with some psychoanalytic concepts. In this reading the truth of the subject is configured as the truth of the amorous subject: as the lover’s stubborn, unyielding attachment to an affective intensity directed toward the beloved. The object of the lover’s affection (which could be a person, but also an idea, or a specific cultural domain) is here interpreted as imaginary in the Lacanian sense: as a specular projection of the lover’s ego, a form deceptively identical with itself. But what constitutes itself as truth is the attachment that binds the lover to this deception, the obdurate affective intensity focused on the beloved. In this perspective, the risk of losing this attachment is experienced by the subject as the looming disintegration of the subject itself, as its dispersion in the anonymous symbolic order – the dimension of power, described by Pasolini in Calderón as «l’unico mondo possibile che la nascita ci assegna». The comparative methodology adopted, rather than focusing on influences and cultural appropriations, aims instead at creating a dialogue between a number of concepts and their creative expressions on the basis of their affinities, thereby seeking to produce mutual illuminations and open up new avenues of meaning.
