Re-reading Pasolini: notes on the traces of Wittgenstein

Abstract

The contribution proposes to investigate the relationship between Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and Pier Paolo Pasolini's artistic and theoretical work, and particularly Pasolini’s peculiar declination of certain Wittgensteinian concepts, first and foremost that of "form of life". Explicitly taken up by Wittgenstein in the 1970s, it also seems to run through the poet's earlier work. Through the peculiar interweaving of form of life and language, also identified by Wittgenstein, it is possible to reread Pasolini's discovery of the Friulian community, the poetic power inscribed in the contact between the poet and the Roman sub-proletariat, Pasolini's fierce critique of the anthropological mutation initiated by triumphant neo-capitalism. Starting from these premises, it will be possible to identify in Pasolini's revival of the Wittgensteinian concept of “form of life” in the 1970s an unprecedented linguistic-aesthetic-political characterization, which will find a new horizon of elaboration in cinema and in the “games” of writing. Pasolini's imagination of a radical otherness, of a new possibility for the use of language and history, will thus appear as the poetic attempt to re-imagine the class struggle, to re-play social relations that have apparently become unchangeable.