Pasolini and Marginal Christianity

In his late political vision, Pier Paolo Pasolini declared the foreclosure of all outsides to capitalist developmentalism. It followed for Pasolini that socialism had suffered a seemingly final defeat and the Italian State no longer needed the Catholic Church to secure hegemony among a population of otherwise divided peoples. Even so, in a series of articles on the Church, Pasolini concedes a persistent ability of the Church to conjure excessive and shocking feelings when it “address problems that the community is familiar with.” How can an irrelevant and marginal institution still shock? The language of excess is a throughline between Pasolini’s Catholic articles, his earlier writings on aesthetics and cinema, and key texts from his major influences: Erich Auerbach, Georges Bataille, and Norman O. Brown. These thinkers share an association between this excessive experience and what Steven Ozment calls “the permanent possibility of historical novelty” in Mysticism and Dissent.