Translating subversive encounters into the tracks of everyday life, p...

In Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968) a young man is a guest of an upper-class family in northern Italy. His appearance beguiles each and every member of the family one after another, both men and women, as well as Emilia the maid. He appears to throw all of them into movement and turmoil. Just as suddenly as he appears as the guest, he disappears again. In the second part the film develops by showing all those affected one after another, what effect the encounter with the stranger triggered and how each of them translates their being driven frantic into the language available to them or into more or less unusual actions. As viewers of the film we are thus witnesses of a dual series of events: first we see a series of significant events of the visually experienced encounter with the stranger, a kind of secular god, Dionysus, who embodies both sexuality as well as the social other or the alien. After the guest’s disappearance, in the second part of the film we then become witnesses of the most varied attempts wishing to reintegrate this significant encounter with the social other, which is dislocating both for sense and the senses, into everyday life again.

The paper discusses such processes of translating significant events (Paul de Man) into everyday language and practices, but also into extraordinary political and myth-guided actions and art. The specific portrayal of these processes by the filmmaker Pasolini and the evaluation that takes place in the process are identified.  Significant perceptual events are discussed as sites of subject constitution, capitalist marketing and the production of meaning in general. In doing so, I refer to approaches by PP Pasolini himself, but also to the event-theories of Paul de Man, Jean-Luc Nancy and Walter Benjamin.  One accent is on the question of how the body, gender and the sense of sight are involved in such processes.