Civilization conflict and death drive. Pasolini's Medea, a current paradigm

Abstract

This communication adopts as its object a textual analysis of the film Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini, referring to his treatment of the conflict between a culture of the sacred, magic the ritual embodied by Medea and a culture of the profane, the rational and the historical represented by Jason during the course of his heroic and destructive adventure of appropriating the Golden Fleece and the seduction of woman. On examining the readings in anthropology and psychoanalysis, along with the study of archetypes and myths carried out by the film director in preparation for his work, and above all, his encounter with the Traité d'histoire des religions (Patterns in Comparative Religions) by Mircea Eliade, the reader can understand the deep, inner reasons behind the effect of deflagration t not only of the ancient world of Colchis, but also the original land in which Jason was raised and brought up by the Centaur and submitted to the violence of hubris, therefore incapable of discerning the relationship with subconscious matrices and, at the same time, with those structured by an earlier and more powerful civilization. Medea's revenge , in this respect, represents, for Pasolini the desperate and irrepressible revelation of a violated law, which questions through the force of atrocious revenge, the mentality of modern men, who are already launched into the nineteen-sixties and seventies and heading towards a nihilistic model of development.