Against the avant-garde Pier Paolo Pasolini, contemporary art, and neocapitalism - Merjian, Ara H. 1974- (The University of Chicago Press, 2020)
Heretical aesthetics – Technical sacrality / heretical aesthetics – Against the avant-garde – Communism, humanism, modernism – Aesthetic deceleration – A tradition of antitradition – Abstraction: the degree zero of history – Abstraction and neocapital – History, rage, painting – Abstraction and/as failed revolution – A cinema of poetry and painting – The zero moment of history – Pop: a mimesis of the future – Mass culture and the crisis of communism – Pop polemics on the left – "All the world at home" – Objective indifference/pop vernacular – Pop, politics, and the ends of irony – The division of history – A mimesis of the future – Arte Povera: prehistory and the aesthetics of contamination – An irrational Marxism and the "intimacy of 'Things'" – Contamination, craft, and the "slang" of matter – The "third world" between history and prehistory – Double representation – Phenomenology/frame – 1968 and after: cold war, hot autumn – Performance: a semiology of action – Body/struggle – Intellectual flesh – Intimacy and exposure – From What is fascism to Salò – Performing the pseudorevolution – Hopes and alibis: Pasolini and contemporary art