Ricerc@Sapienza

Desire cannot be taught, only witnessed. In Pasolini's pedagogical attitude there is an attempt to transmit the ability to desire to young people. But is it possible to convey the desire? To what extent is the ability to desire inherited? To witness this ability, the result of a mixture of times and affections, to transmit that legacy, became Pasolini's last task, through “indialectic” works, open to the contradiction of life: the screenplay of the film he never accomplished on Saint Paul, and then Teorema, The New Youth, Salò, and Petrolio.
Beyond the shared reasons of the students’ protest, he read in the Movement some senseless and unrealistic agitations. On the one hand, he caught in it a legitimate reaction against the mortification of desire required by consumerist capitalism: that’s why he became a students' companion. On the other hand he realized that they had not recognized the other objective of the Palace: the substantial rejection of that excess which is joy (jouissance), unmanageable by capitalism because beyond its logic.
In Sixty-eight boys and girls’ "mysterious will not to be sons", Pasolini read the rejection to take charge, albeit critically, of any inheritance. Their "guilt" as children consisted in the uncritical acceptance of the vectoriality of bourgeois time, without conceiving the chance of an alternative story, or the possibility of going back and start all over again.