California Italian Studies

Pasolini for the Future responds to a recent book by the French art critic Georges Didi-Huberman entitled Survival of the Fireflies [La survivance des lucioles] (2009) in which the critic, albeit with some measure of sympathy, accuses Pier Paolo Pasolini and, to a lesser extent, Giorgio Agamben of being too attached to the past and too apocalyptic with regard to the future. Disputing the soundness of Didi-Huberman's criticism, this essay discusses Pasolini's belief in change and transformation through a close reading of his late critical essays collected in the volumes Lutheran Letters [Lettere luterane] and Corsair Writings [Scritti corsari]. In these writings, the idea of the future as a radically different prospect from the present looms large. To understand this view of the future requires revisiting the issue of Pasolini's insistence on a cultural apocalypse. Through a reading of the scenario for Pasolini’s unproduced film project "Porno-Teo-Kolossal" and of his responses to the influential work of the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, it becomes possible to reframe this issue in order to question the ethical and political presuppositions behind the general tendency of commentators to assail Pasolini's supposedly apocalyptic tone of thought.