It was the distant June 24th, 1974, when Pier Paolo Pasolini, in the pages of Corriere della Sera, once again stirred public outrage by expressing concepts that were profound and yet, paradoxically, simple and lucid—reflections on the “faceless Power.” A power he detested and, at the same time, mastered. Illuminator of the people and misunderstood artist, the bond between this man and the Italian Right today outlines a relationship that is certainly controversial, made of clashes and encounters, memories and unspoken truths. One could almost say that the Right and the Left were two opposing sides of his personality, two ideological extremes that nonetheless coexisted within him.
Everyone remembers Pasolini the eclectic Marxist: communist and anti-modern, populist and blasphemous. But he was also much more. Even today, fifty years after his violent death, the ideological legacy he left behind leads us to a relentless reflection on the historical connection that, willingly or not, has ended up tying him indissolubly to that old-fashioned historical Right. Uncomfortable to both Left and Right, P.P. proves incompatible with the ideological void which—now as then—defines the Italian political landscape. “A void made of extinguished passions and corpse-like ideologies,” writes Marcello Veneziani, one of the leading right-wing intellectuals who recently spoke about the poet’s death.
And so, it turns out that there is Right and Right. There was a Right that loved him, and a Right that realized who he was far too late, after having contested him. But there was also a single hypocritical and opportunistic Left, capable of abandoning and denying him once it discovered he was homosexual, expelling him from the Italian Communist Party. Is it possible that no one remembers that P.P. had a brother who was a partisan, killed by communist partisans? That he criticized the expanding power of the Left, disguised as serving the Resistance? Why do we never say that Pasolini wrote one of his first articles as an enthusiastic account of a trip to Weimar with fascist university students, and that his last poem was dedicated to a young fascist to whom he suggested loving the tradition of a “divine Right,” defined by three cardinal principles: to defend, to preserve, and to pray?
Pier Paolo despised the Christian Democrats, condemned racism, and yet loved that world of the Left—at times communist—that was still healthy and opposed to the rise of neo-capitalism.
We could draw infinite facets of Pier Paolo, but one thing is certain: the Right, which once stood against him, granted him full military honors at his funeral and began to question the essence of his thought—his being “beyond” old ideological affiliations. How? By recognizing him—just as Marcello Veneziani highlighted—and rethinking him through his own writings, those of June 24th, 1974: the Corsair Writings, capable of criticizing the false rebellion of the bourgeois youth of ’68, pampered by the dominant (left-wing) culture, and when he went even further, siding with the police officers (“because—they are sons of the poor. They come from the outskirts, whether rural or urban”) against the rich, bourgeois “daddy’s boys.”
Today, as then, fifty years after his dramatic death, to speak of Pasolini means to speak of this as well: broken taboos, a true desire to look at the present with an eye toward the future, and above all, a cultural radicalism that today’s Right has perhaps forgotten—and must rediscover.
Because there is Right and Right, and as journalist Camillo Langone wrote in a well-known article in Il Foglio, today the Right is above all the one “in Chanel, like Stefania Prestigiacomo; the fashionably homosexualist Right of Mara Carfagna; the opportunistic and nihilist Right of Gianfranco Fini; the Right that enters ancient villages in black SUVs as long as hearses, bejeweled, invoking harsh laws against muggers and thieves but recoiling at the mention of the death penalty, because Europe disapproves; the Right that gets emotional at the national anthem and then orders champagne; the Right that has no language of its own and calls foreigners ‘extracomunitari’ and homosexuals ‘gay’; that goes on holiday instead of having children, watches television instead of reading, hires lawyers instead of behaving virilely; the Right that lives in suburban duplexes, collects watches, and calls itself ‘center-right,’ confusing and losing itself in a left-sounding image worn thin by total emptiness.”
This would be a Right uncomfortable even for Pier Paolo—this time, truly. He was certainly no man of the Left.
by Giuseppe Papalia
