Pasolini's Gramsci

Abstract

When discussing those who perhaps most influenced the thought of the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, critic and filmaker, one critic recently spoke of 'il suo Gramsci.1 Implied in this possessive is the highly personal interpretation that Pasolini attached to the example and writings of Antonio Gramsci, revolutionary political theorist whose famous notebooks survived their author's death in 1937 after eleven years of Fascist imprisonment. What follows attempts to qualify this implication through a survey of Pasolini's writings directly linked to a reading of Gramsci. Demonstration should emerge to bolster those claims of a subjective interpretation whose ultimate complexity can best be described generally as a curious admixture of confraternity and contradiction. The closing section of L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (1958), containing verse composed between 1943 and 1949, carries the subtitle, La scoperta di Marx. War and the Italian Partisan response had transformed Pasolini, leading him to the conviction that life demands qualcos'altro che amore/per il proprio destino.2 For the young Pasolini, that something other prompted a probe into an