f The Twilight of The Idols: Perversity as eternal return and will-to-power in Antonio Margheriti’s The Virgin Of Nuremberg

Through a close reading of Antonio Margheriti’s The Virgin of Nuremberg, this article explores perverse desire as a means of utilizing the body as a political (and by extension, trans-historical) catalyst for de- and re-localizing stable cultural identities. Thus, what is specifically Italian and/or horrific about the so-called Italian horror genre becomes innately deterritorialized, bleeding over into the tropes of German Expressionism through latently Teutonic cultural signifiers (e.g., German Gothic, Nazi demonology and the necrophilia of 19th-Century German Romanticism). The result is a new, hybrid form of the monstrous that frees the political from its nationalist tethers and harnesses it to a more Nietzschean genealogical indeterminacy, generating what Gilles Deleuze calls a ‘collective leaven’, a ‘people yet to come’.