Sexual liberation as slavery, or America in the wake of Pasolini (and the film "Salò")

In America, the unmastered past that is the persistent afterlife of slavery, our defining national trauma, is present not only in the typically adolescent inability to properly mark the problematic distinction between authority and liberty, but also in a generalized cynicism towards individual projects and life aspirations whenever they might fall outside the bureaucratized norms of a mass economy and the education that until recently was oriented to it. Including in the political ethics of sexuality.

In the very cynical notions so popular in my generation (I came of age in the 70s) about sexuality--everyone is a per vert; satisfactions are obscene, and yet unavoidably universal; everyone, or every man, just wants some fucking; and you must declare to the police, so to speak, your gender and sexuality identity, which you may freely choose but you must choose in one of the available ways notwithstanding--in the great bourgeois equal and free dispensation of being unfree only in being free and having to choose, to choose yourself as driven and destined to this or that line of desire, activity, and work--for your desire is the index not of gratuitous, accidental, to be accepted but not programmed pleasures, as in some time-weary, aristocratic Gelassenheit, the "democracy" that a resigned man with a streak on the side of his face proposes in "La Notte," which consists of accepting what happens--no, your desire is your identity, the key to the story or style of performance that is your personality, and you positively must be true to it, do what it dictates--

In this is not only a facet of what the Italian Marxists after Mario Tronti (in Workers and Capital, from 1966, recently published in English by Verso Books) called the "social factory," meaning that all of life now is part of the production process, everything you do is in some sense both meaningful work and labor (which need not be interesting) to be exploited, but also:

The sad continuation in the heart of what remains of old Europe and its cultures and peoples, e.g. the Americans who are merely designated by their color, which is both clean and neutral in our imagination, open to all influences and cultures, except of course what it directly contradicts --

Of slavery. You can think what you like, and choose, now as a free worker, what job to work at, or what, if you are a freelancer or pseudo-independent worker emplopyed as a freelancer, but you must choose, and choose to engage yourself in the tasks of a worker who theoretically, itn eh petty bourgeois frame=work, desires to realize his desire as a project, --

in all this is most essentially your birth, death, and sexuality. The sexual, women's and gay revolutions were all smelted down to this essence, because they could be:

You can freely choose what beings you would like to fuck, and who, or better what, you can expect to be fucked by and how.

This is the Orwellian, not dialectical, world, for freedom is slavery. In a world where contradictions are resolved in and as death. A death prefigured by indifference. The world before slipping away for good loses its meaning as there are no objects of care, only anxieties directed towards this or that form of destruction.

Our great national trauma is represented in part as the fear that some of us, or “them,” are, still or once again, slaves, as minds reduced to bodies, freedom to make oneself as obligation to choose from among ready-made images of self and objects of desire, and vitality and imagination reduced to cynicism and resignation.

Desperate was that cry, to live free or die.