The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade.

Frontain, Raymond-Jean

by Armando Maggi

University of Chicago Press. 424 pages, $49.

In an attempt to define the religious vision of resurrection that follows "metamorphosis, division, doubling, and annihilation" in the final stage of the great Italian filmmaker's development, Armando Maggi offers excruciatingly detailed readings of the following items: two unproduced and unpublished film scripts, Saint Paul and Porn-Theo-Colossai, an incomplete novel, Petrolio, which only appeared in 1992, some seventeen years after Pasolini's death; and Salo, the controversial film that featured prominently in the trial of the hustler who murdered the director. Analyzing Pasolini's complex and troubling images in the context of his reading of such disparate figures as Mircea Eliade, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Pierre Klossowski (as mediated by Gilles Deleuze), Maggi depicts a Pasolini who was driven to create a religious myth for the post-mythic, capitalistic world; who reacted against the 1960's Sexual Revolution for openly revealing what previously had been kept hidden; and who saw homosexuality as proof of the Fall of humankind. The denseness and occasional tedium of Maggi's prose results in part from his need to describe in detail texts not otherwise available to the reader, but more so from Pasolini's own tortured over-intellectualizing of his need to be "feminized" by the hustlers with whom he consorted. Nonetheless, Maggi succeeds in defining as a religious writer a man whose images of sodomy, coprophilia, and affectless sexual cruelty made him the bane of Italy's Roman Catholic Church and socialist government.