UC Berkeley

Through readings of literary, cinematic, and psychoanalytic works by Sigmund Freud, C.P. Cavafy, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, I consider the forms of gay male pleasure that emerge in the aftermath of loss. These modern writers and filmmakers engage archaic Greek rituals of mourning in order to express erotic desires and identifications that are prohibited within life and in relations between the living. I argue that works including Pasolini’s film Oedipus Rex (1967), some of Cavafy’s modern Greek poetry, and writings by Freud seek recourse to archaic Greek ritual traditions, such as the lament, in order to reimagine the work of living with enduring loss.

Crucial to this project is a set of works, including a “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909), the “Papers on Technique” (1911-1915), and The Ego and the Id (1923) by Sigmund Freud; the modern Greek poetry of C.P. Cavafy written in Alexandria during the first third of the twentieth century; and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s postwar Italian film Oedipus Rex (1967). Freud’s reflections on both mourning and endurance can be read as a problem of modernism in relation to the poetry Cavafy and the film of Pasolini, each of whom offers a novel way of thinking about desire between men when it is figured as an impossible desire whose prohibition engenders an unspeakable loss, an endless mourning, and a pleasure that is difficult, if not impossible, to avow and only at the risk of punitive consequences. In Freud and the literary and cinematic works that I study, modernism is the period in which the prohibition against homosexuality becomes an explicit theme along with the consequences for enduring loss. The poetry of Cavafy, the cinema of Pasolini, and writings by Freud respond to the problem of loss within modernity through aesthetic and technical forms that manage mourning without end by binding it to a historically specific pleasure that facilitates the work of living with loss. Formally, generically, and historically divergent works find in Greek literary tradition the aesthetic potential to manage what is unmanageable about loss in modernity; in doing so, they break down the distinction between poetry, film, and ritual as a formal concern. By illuminating an archive of secreted mourning within modernity, my readings in each chapter articulate how novel sexual positions become possible when grief acknowledges what is prohibited from being mourned.