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2. Pasolini’s Scritti corsari and Lasch’s The Revolt
of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
Scritti corsari was the last work of Pier Paolo Pasolini published dur-
ing his lifetime. In this collection of short essays – in particular of
articles written between January 1973 and February 1975 for the
Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera – Pasolini draws on contingent
situations, inherent in Italian political and social events. Never -
theless, by discussing these events, the author takes the opportunity
to argue, debate and above all defend his own political and philo-
sophical position against criticism expressed in other newspapers
by other Italian intellectuals like Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and
Pasolini’s close friend Alberto Moravia. In Italy, in the first half of
the 1970s political debates included questions on the legalization
of abortion or divorce, but Pasolini, in the brief pages of his essays
always succeeds in orientating the discussions toward general posi-
tions.
As Pasolini himself often claims, the sociological aspects in his
works are not new at all. In Scritti corsari there is nothing which has
not already been said in the past. Commodity fetishism, repressive
tolerance, effects of the mass cultural industry: all these subject
matters have been investigated and deeply analyzed decades before
Pasolini, for example by the critical social theorists of the Frankfurt
School. Thus the originality of Scritti corsari does not pertain to his-
torical or social analysis, even though the application of this kind
of analysis to the particular Italian situation is absolutely new and
Pasolini displays both original assumptions and conclusions. On
the contrary, Pasolini’s analysis being so closely related to the
Italian situation, one could say that Scritti corsari is not a work for
easy international diffusion. In fact the author was, and probably
still is, recognized worldwide more for his films than for his nov-
els, poems or essays. Nevertheless, Scritti corsari is characterized by
an interesting element of novelty which is worth emphasizing for
at least three reasons. The first reason concerns the radicalization of
the questions Pasolini faces. The second is the originality of this
brief essay’s style, a sort of closing speech which handles objections
from other intellectuals and tends to counter them by adopting a
STEFANO ROSATTI
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