the Futurist artist is portrayed as a warrior with his head raised to violate, or rape, the mystery of reality.

The sexual overtones of these passages cast the Fu-turist epistemological and aesthetic model into a gendered situation, which sets up an aggressive, virile subject against a feminized reality to be conquered or destroyed. Marinetti's manifestos provides a sort of blueprint for the Futurist male-centered project. Such a project involves three log-ically successive steps: 1) marking boundaries and setting up objectives to be destroyed; 2) constructing the text as a site for violent ac-tion; 3) creating new myths
In the first step-the staging of barricades-the feminine principle is associated with everything Futurism is supposed to fight against: all past traditions in art (particularly sentimental poetry), the parlia-mentary system, pacifism, as well as constrictive mores and institu-tions that lead to the
country's decadence while stifling virile energy and courage

The manifesto relies crucially on a rhetorical strategy that brings gen-der into relation with political and aesthetic issues, a strategy in which femininity works as a mark of impotence, disease, and frag-mentation attached to those mental attitudes that contradict Futurist hubris. Marinetti railed against the worship of tra-dition while celebrating an anti-sentimental, virile art, and the wor-ship of strength, heroism, and courage misogynist strategies as a response to the crisis of the cul-tural order. boundaries along gender lines between a virile self and a feminine or feminized other-a structuring of reality which sets up an enemy to be ostracized and fought. We are thus led to another fundamental strategy of the manifesto-the second step of the Futurist project: the construction of the text as a site for violence, in which woman often figures as a target.

Violence with its derivatives-strife, war, destruction-is a crucial thematic focus and a most exploited semantic field in Marinetti's writing. War, in particular, is celebrated as a natural phenomenon6lan vital, "world's hygiene, " a necessary regenerating, purifying pro-cess, and is aestheticized as spectacle-an exhilarating expenditure of energies The feminine, often identified with passivity, pacifism, and romantic love, is here associated with war and its products in a relationship predicated by verbs that connote activity ("frugare," "cercare") and aggression ("dare l'assalto"). From a psychoanalytical perspective, one may argue that woman, as the image of formlessness, or "lack," is cathected by existential anxieties which are sustained by castration anxieties. In other words, the feminine threat stands for the disem-powerment of modern man in a rapidly changing world which baffles existing ethical and epistemological codes. In order to exorcize this threat and flesh out the Futurist fiction of male power, the manifesto repeatedly displays the feminine body in a violent act of sexual/verbal subjugation.

to produce a reassuring representation of self, founded on exclusive opposition and on the devaluation of otherness
one. Ac-cordingly, modern reality in the Futurist manifesto is not, as in other texts, a problematic world of contradictions to explore; it is, instead, a source of new myths to celebrate-a world to colonize and subjugate in a self-assertive, self-aggrandizing enterprise. the theme of destructive violence is inextrica-bly bound up with the construction of new myths predicated on the terrain of modernity-the third step of the Futurist project: the utopia of the multiplied, metallicized man, who will be immunized against the disease of love; the celebration of technological progress-life in the industrial city, the "electric" war; and the exaltation of the allpowerful, but controllable machine, which replaces woman as the ideal of beauty and as the object of man's narcissistic love.

The perpetrator of this violence can only be a "mechanized" man who, having jettisoned sentiments and lust for woman, is engaged in a genital sexuality which aims solely at mechanical relief or reproduc-tion Thus, the Futurist discourse of destruction and creation foregrounds gender only to exclude woman as subject in the act of male (pro)cre-ation: the expenditure of the female principle serves the goal of mas-culinization of creative economy, and the erotic imagery conveys the sense of excitement and pleasure projected in these fantasies of male progress and mastery over nature It is important to keep in mind that Marinetti's metaphor of sexual violence is the radical version of a very old phallic fantasy: to expose or unveil and penetrate the secrets of nature
"patterns of male and female socialization that reproduce a sexualization of aggression, power, and domination," lending force to the association of love with female "impotence" and of autonomy with male "power," aggression and separation from the "other"-maternal love first, then human others and nature (114). Futurist mixture of primitive and technological imagery: the unleashed irrational-a force which can revitalize a decaying world-must be channeled into new protective and empowering structures-Railroad, airplane, electricity-to exorcise the threats inherent to it this aesthetic of the ma-chine betrays a deep need for a new model of order, power, and control: the search for a new all-male symbolic structure to restrain the outbreak of the feminine-connoted irrational. nova mitologija koja proistice iz savremenog tehnoloskog sveta mehanizacije i brzine mit automobila nika izgleda kao da ide unapred zato kaze lepse je od nike, zato se boconi nadovezuje na niku, futurizam ide vise napred iracionalna borba od nicea potice, neograniceni vitalizam coveka

za futurizam nacionalizam ima potencijal da transformise socijalnu strukturu pitanje zasto se iracionalnost slavi preko masina koje su vrlo kontrolisuce, one su plod nauke, intelekta? kapitalizam doveo do krize posle procvata industrije? Marinetti's antidote to the ills of modern decadence is the formulation of a mythical new subjectivity that rejects the limits of history and empowers itself by appropriating the marvels of technology to create a utopian Futurist wonderland infused with primal life forces. This regenerative program incorporates irrationalist ideologemes like the Nietzschean notion of the Ubermensch and the Sorelian idea of the revolutionary force of myth, combined with scientific theories of evolutionary perfectibility. Its founding myth is the (re)birth of a Futurist superuomo, predicated on the liquidation of the old rational, introspective, and sentimental "I," and on a hyperbolic expansion of the New Man's energy, intuition, imagination, and will to power Marinetti's poetics of "destruction of syntax," "imagination without strings," "words in freedom" and "aeropoetry" attacks linguistic conventions to produce syntactic violence.' The ultimate target is the old "I" of traditional literature: "We systematically destroy the literary I so that it may dissolve in the universal vibration, and we arrive at the point of expressing the infinitely minute and the excitations of molecules Femininity is associated with the other that must be rejected or assimilated in the effort to affirm an allpowerful
In Futurist poetics, the machine is celebrated as new inspiring muse, aesthetic model, and object of desire--a narcissistic object that allows for the rejection of female lack, mirroring man's

ambition for supernatural power. The myth of a regenerating union between man and machine constitutes the supporting framework of the fiction of power: the first manifesto celebrates the rebirth of a new poet-hero in symbiosis with his fast car The infamous precept of"disprezzo della donna" ("scorn for woman") in the 1909 manifesto ensues "naturally" from the resolution to embrace revolutionary, belligerent ideals. The utopian goal of creating a "multiplied," immortal superman entails the introjection of the machine's empowering qualities--energy, precision, discipline-and the expulsion (through projection onto a feminine or feminized other) of human frailties such as sensibility, sensuality, skepticism, and pessimism. Woman, nevertheless, plays a crucial rhetorical and thematic role in Futurist writings. Femininity is deployed in abundance, as a means of demarcating the "other" against which the self (either as individual, avant-garde group, or nation) can be defined. It is associated with all that man has to eschew, subjugate, or contain in order to create form, meaning, and identity