PETITION AGAINST THE REDUCTION OF PASOLINI TO AN “ORGANIC INTELLECTUAL”

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​The author of the Scritti Corsari cut through Italian culture like a buccaneer. He never sailed under a flag. He gathered together his "scandalized" interventions on current affairs in a spontaneous way, analyzing small sequences of life that were happening before his eyes. For him, the result of the referendum on divorce of May 13, 1974, was a defeat, not only for the Vatican, but also for the Communist Party, which seemed to him somewhat surprised by a victory it had not foreseen. In his eyes then, the two Italian “Churches” of the time lost, while respect for the person won, along with the sense of freedom, and moral non-violence – namely, the “total, absolute, and imperative lack of any form of moralism”.
 
The author of Lutheran Letters, collected his last published writings together shortly before his death, placing them under the banner of the great heretic of Eisleben, the man who opened the way to the decline of the principle of authority in the west and this by upholding the value of his own speech against the two main authorities of his time: the Church and the Emperor. The heretic is the man who chooses, and in the first pages of his book, addressing the ideal reader, Pasolini writes: “Just as I chose you, you chose me… If you are not a miracle, then you are an exception. Yes, it is true… What could I find better to make my text at least literally exceptional?”
 
The author of The Street Kids, A Violent Life, and the director of Accattone, was able to describe various strata of humanity on the margins of the social classes: men, women and children whom he had really known in the course of his life. Italian society, caught up in what Pasolini refers to as an “anthropological mutation”, forgot about them, or at least tried not to look at them because they could not be placed in the sociological categories that would have allowed them to be recognized by the authorities.
 
We firmly demand that Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was surely the freest intellectual of our recent history, be respected for what he was and continues to be in his writings. At the time when high-ranking politicians in Italy were qualified as “race horses”, Pasolini was a “Maverick”, the name given in the West to wild horses that do not bear the mark of any owner. We refuse to allow Pasolini to be debased or reduced to being “the organic intellectual”. We refuse to allow any political Church to appropriate him by marking him with the label of a political party, which is what the Democratic Party, the Partito Democratico, are currently trying to do by naming a school of political formation after him. --Trans. Philip Dravers
 
 
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