Managing Desire: Heretical Transformation in Pasolini’s Medea

In this essay, I theorize desire’s role in the construction of heretical subjectivity through an exploration of Italian poet, theorist, and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic interpretation of Medea. Pasolini’s film and sound techniques, in conjunction with his ideological agenda, move Medea’s tragic narrative beyond the accusatory tone of familiar tropes into a theoretical tale of semoiticized social structures and the flow of human capita. What Pasolini provides is less a strategy for managing heretical desire and more an attitude of action and waiting, of silence and communication, but always in the wake of desire. Act I 1. The two sides As yet there’s no language. These words, therefore, must be shown: what is war? War happens when one side fights another side. Side One (still no speaking): Nothing given to or understandable by humans. The appearances of nothing in the world: In geographical terms, the desert. In psychological terms, those who are not rational, logical or understandable to humans: the witches. I