Pier Paolo Pasolini
Memory(s) and resonances
March 21-22 –University of Strasbourg
On March 5, 2022, Pasolini would have been one hundred years old. In the Peninsula as in France, tributes, theatrical releases of restored films or other works honor the one that Italian society nevertheless tried to put on the index, like the censorship to which he was prey and its incessant contacts with the judicial authorities. Modeled by the trace that is inscribed in time and archived, the memory of Pasolini’s work today seems maintained, organised, aroused. Is it returned for all that? If retrospectives are flourishing, Pasolini’s word seems to be discreetly ostracized: Italian volumes containing Pasolini’s writings on politics, society, art and literature are almost impossible to find and, surprisingly, have not the object of no reissue in anticipation of the anniversary date yet so celebrated. Certain facets of Pasolini would therefore tend to be forgotten, even buried, thus questioning the ethical notion of choice, whether it concerns the updating of the archive, or the meaning of the restoration of the trace. Can we see in this chosen and truncated memory the sign of an ideological or political will? According to Luca Ronconi: “Pier Paolo Pasolini had a look of anticipation, premonitory on several events in Italian society. As long as this Pasolini gaze covers ways of being, that it corresponds to evolutions, it is highly probable that Pasolini’s work will remain current”. Moreover, this prophetic vision is not specific to Italy: by questioning the past, and with it, tradition, Pasolini has never ceased to confront Western societies with Modernity. In this perspective, how can we analyze today the way in which this “look of anticipation”, paradoxically turned towards the past, is received?
Constituting Pasolini’s polymorphous work, tradition has in fact never ceased to be questioned by the poet through a correlative element of memory, the source, declined sometimes around novelistic writing, poetry, painting, theater and cinema. Whether it is a question of articulating them around the myth, reflection in Pasolini of the sacredness of an ahistorical world whose reality is in itself hierophanic, or around the holy scriptures, mirror of a still archaic Church and by the fact not distorted, these memories have in common to go against a modernity in loss of identity and spirituality.
This opposition to the rationalization of the world appears in the influences that nourished Pasolini, like Russian thought or Giovanni Pascoli, to whom Pasolini devoted “a sort of commented anthology” as part of his university degree. The author of L’ERA Nuova denounced the limits of a reality reduced to a simple scientific classification, half a century before Pasolini deplored a bourgeoisie that had lost the sense of the sacred. This same bourgeoisie that Nicolas Berdiaeff defined not from the angle of a paradigmatic vision of class as opposed to the proletariat as is the case with Marx, but precisely in terms of its almost non-existent relationship to spirituality and its grounded in materiality.
It is on the other hand in dialogue with Gramsci that will be reflected, in a political perspective, Pasolini’s relationship to memory, here collective. Essential to organize tradition, to restore the history of the people, to affirm its identity, and to fight against the standardization of culture by the dominant power and ideology, its reactivation appears as a bulwark against hegemony. .
By celebrating memory as Pasolini articulated it, but also that of which it is the object, the whole issue of this colloquium will ultimately be to make the words of the Italian intellectual resonate in our century, and beyond. , to question our ability to still perceive its echoes: to listen, to look, to understand the one who liked to speak in parables.
The methods of apprehension will be as numerous as the objects studied. From literary analysis to that of moving images, from the phenomena recorded by his poems to the iconological forces that run through his images and those that feed them, it will be necessary to combine a number of disciplines and capacities for reflection in order to outline what the notion of memory makes it possible to say of the immense Pasolinian work.
The communication proposals, of 3000 characters including spaces, accompanied by a short bio-bibliography, must be sent by December 18, 2022 in PDF format to the following address: colloquiumpasolini23@gmail.com. Feedback will be sent by the committee on January 20, 2023.
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Organizing Committee – University of Strasbourg
Francesco D’Antonio (CHER),
Anna Frabetti (CHER),
Ariane Loraschi (Literary Configurations),
Raphaël Szöllösy (ACCRA),
Patrick Werly (Literary Configurations).