Salò was first screened, in Paris, on the 23rd of November 1975. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film is tangled in the memory with his death three weeks prior. [Hannah] Arendt considered the appeal of the Marquis de Sade to intellectuals of the interwar years—a promise of criminal authenticity—anticipating Pasolini’s transposition of The 120 Days of Sodom to the Italian Social Republic.1

Yet Salò was intended as a critique of consumerism, which had transformed Italy within the space of a decade, not fascism. Parallels may be drawn between the cultural “genocide”2 Pasolini described and [Shoshana] Zuboff’s reference to the “atrocities”3 of surveillance capitalism. If intensified sensation is, in some “Sadean” sense, common to each respective mutation4 of the market economy, its locus is the human nervous system. For Arendt, moreover, the body—libertine or otherwise—is a final threshold: the militant goes over, disavowing human form.

Decades after his appearance in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew, Giorgio Agamben came to prominence worldwide. A series of blog posts criticised emergency measures against the spread of coronavirus. The pandemic he argued had brought to the fore the tendency of modern medicine to “split the unity of our vital experience, which is always inseparably bodily and spiritual, into a purely biological entity on one hand and an affective and cultural life on the other.”5 The estranged spiritual component was the domain of “The Church”. Benjamin Bratton designated Agamben’s oeuvre a form of “literature”: it was irrelevant, if not inimical, to the epidemiological realities of the moment.6

Pasolini would seem the quintessential littérateur. It was perhaps for this reason Agamben took exception to Salò. Intended by the director as a break with all that preceded it,7 the film complicates Agamben’s dichotomy of medical “abstraction”8 and religiosity: Pasolini found intimations of The 120 Days in Dante’s Inferno,9 leavening Sade’s materialism with a theology of sensation. Agamben’s suggestion that with Salò the “representation” of power had replaced its contestation signifies a refusal of Pasolini’s thought. The claim he “could no longer distinguish his own anarchism from that of the four villainous hierarchs” implies a turn to political reaction.10

An extract from Zuboff and Dystopia (forthcoming) © Shivdeep Grewal 2025. 

1 Arendt, H. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism (Allen & Unwin Ltd, Second Enlarged Edition, 1958): p. 330.

2 Pasolini, P.P. (1975*) “Il vuoto del potere" ovvero "l'articolo delle lucciole” [Machine translation from the Italian], Corriere della Sera, 1 February 1975, available at: https://www.corriere.it/speciali/pasolini/potere.html (accessed 19 October 2025). See also Chiesi, R. (2011) “Salò: The Present as Hell”, The Criterion Collection, 4 October 2011, available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/513-salo-the-present-as-hell (accessed 18 October 2025).

3 Zuboff, S. (2022) “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization”, Organisational Theory, Vol. 3, 1-79: p. 7.

4 Pasolini, 1975*

5 Agamben, G. (2020) “A Question”, Translated by Adam Kotsko, An und für sich, 15 April 2020, available at: https://itself.blog/2020/04/15/giorgio-agamben-a-question/ (accessed 18 October 2025).

6 Bratton, B. (2021) “Agamben WTF, or How Philosophy Failed the Pandemic”, Verso Blog, 28 July 2021, available at: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5125-agamben-wtf-or-how-philosophy-failed-the-pandemic?srsltid=AfmBOopVE3XnXITEf7uoAxI5PkSjTl5sHDinopjzEqLVO5sLKndQcRYt (accessed 18 October 2025).

7 Powers, J. (1998) “Salò”, The Criterion Collection, 21 July 1998, available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/35-salo (accessed 19 October 2025).

8 Agamben, 2020.

9 Bachmann, G. (1976) “Pasolini’s Last Film”, Film Comment, March-April 1976, 38-47: p. 45. See also Rohdie, S. (2011) “Salò: A Cinema of Poetry”, The Criterion Collection, 4 October 2011, available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/512-salo-a-cinema-of-poetry?srsltid=AfmBOooEpw7Fr012n4wCcOOJ-kKmNLMUS59sipHmrFOyOb7nV65RkbqH (accessed on 19 October 2025).

10 Agamben, G. (2017) “Giorgio Agamben ci racconta Pasolini: l’anarchia del potere, la scomparsa delle lucciole” [Machine translation from the Italian], Città Pasolini, 25 November 2017, available at: https://www.cittapasolini.com/post/giorgio-agamben-pasolini-intervista?mibextid=Zxz2cZ (accessed 18 October 2025).