We are all living Pasolini's Theorem
By Pepe Escobar
BOLOGNA - In the early morning of November 2, 1975, in Idroscalo, a terminally dreadful shanty town in Ostia, outside Rome, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini, then 53, an intellectual powerhouse and one of the greatest filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, was found badly beaten and run over by his own Alfa Romeo.
It was hard to conceive a more stunning, heartbreaking, modern mix of Greek tragedy with Renaissance iconography; in a bleak setting straight out of a Pasolini film, the author himself was immolated just like his main character in Mamma Roma (1962) lying in prison in the manner of the Dead Christ, aka the Lamentation of Christ, by Andrea Mantegna.
This might have been a gay tryst gone terribly wrong; a 17-year-old low life was charged with murder, but the young man was also linked with the Italian neo-fascists. The true story has never emerged. What did emerge is that "the new Italy" - or the aftereffects of a new capitalist revolution - killed Pasolini.
'Those destined to be dead'
Pasolini could only reach for the stars after graduating in literature from Bologna University - the oldest in the world - in 1943. Today, a Pasolini is utterly unthinkable. He would be something like an UFIO (unidentified flying intellectual object); the total intellectual - poet, dramatist, painter, musician, fiction writer, literary theorist, filmmaker and political analyst.
in full: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-02-170114.html
ZombieHorde
(29,047 posts)Thank you so much for posting this! <3
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)hunter
(38,311 posts)What we call "productivity" in today's market isn't productivity at all.
It is the corrosive destruction of our natural and community environments.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Glad you enjoyed the piece.
pscot
(21,024 posts)As Pasolini argued, the new specimens were those who until the mid-1950s would have been victims of infant mortality. Science intervened and saved them from physical death. So they are survivors, "and in their life there's something of contro natura". Thus, Pasolini argued, as sons that are born today are not, a priori, "blessed", those that are born "in excess" are definitely "unblessed".
In short, for Pasolini, sporting a sentiment of not being really welcomed, and even being guilty about it, the new generation was "infinitely more fragile, brutish, sad, pallid, and ill than all preceding generations". They are depressed or aggressive. And "nothing may cancel the shadow that an unknown abnormality projects over their life". Nowadays, this interpretation can easily explain the alienated, cross-border Islamic youth who joins a jihad in desperation.