Every era inherits what it has failed to understand. And what it cannot understand, it tries to reduce, simplify, render compatible with its dominant languages. Legacy, before being a gift, is a burden: something resistant to use, elusive to categorization, continuing to generate friction.

In this sense, Pier Paolo Pasolini is not a figure of the past, nor a completed author of the twentieth century. He is an open, unresolved, structurally uncomfortable legacy. Not because interpretations are lacking, but because no interpretation can fully contain him without betraying him.

Pasolini is not something to be transmitted serenely. He is what returns when the languages of the present begin to show their cracks.

Pasolini as a Permanent Scandal

Each time Pasolini resurfaces in public discourse, he does so as a problem—never as a solution. He is not invoked to pacify, but to disturb. And precisely for this reason, there are constant attempts to neutralize him: isolating a phrase, decontextualizing a judgment, turning a radical critique into a signal of allegiance.

But Pasolini was never a “placeable” author. Not because he was ambiguous, but because he refused the very idea of placement. He always spoke from an exposed, precarious position, without ideological protection. He did not build a camp; he crossed through them. He did not establish a doctrine; he opened a wound.

Reducing Pasolini to an identity function—leftist, anti-leftist, post-left—means failing to understand that his gesture was never one of adhesion, but of disarticulation.

Critique of the Left: Responsibility, Not Abjuration

Pasolini’s polemic against the historical left is one of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of his thought. It has been interpreted as a rupture, a conversion, even at times as a move toward conservative positions. But this reading rests on a fundamental error: it confuses internal critique with a change of camp.

Pasolini never ceased to interrogate the left as a space of historical responsibility. His critique is so harsh precisely for this reason. He does not speak from outside, but from within a profound disappointment. He blames the left not for being insufficiently conservative, but for having stopped questioning power just when power was changing form.

The power Pasolini identifies is no longer the recognizable face of twentieth-century oppressive ideologies. It is a diffuse, anonymous, pervasive power, capable of infiltrating everyday behavior, desire, and language itself. A power that no longer demands obedience but consent; that no longer imposes prohibitions but models of life.

In Pasolini’s view, the left’s failure is having stopped naming this power. Having accepted it as an inevitable horizon. Having confused progress with emancipation.

There is in this accusation no nostalgia for order. Rather, there is an awareness that modernization can become a higher form of domination.

The New Power and the End of Innocence

In Scritti corsari and Lettere luterane, Pasolini formulates a diagnosis that today appears with almost unbearable clarity: the most effective power is the one that does not present itself as such.

It is no longer a matter of visible repression, but of profound homogenization—a process that acts on bodies even before it acts on ideas, that standardizes behaviors, desires, expectations. A power that erases real differences in the name of a false freedom of consumption.

Here lies the scandalous core of Pasolini’s legacy: his denunciation offers no consolation. There is no “before” to return to, nor a “future” already drawn. There is only the responsibility of refusing to accept the present as natural.

Antimodernity as Mourning

Pasolini’s antimodernity has often been misread as reactionary nostalgia. In reality, it is a form of mourning—not for an idealized past, but for a destroyed historical possibility.

Popular cultures, dialects, non-homogenized ways of life are not, for Pasolini, political models to be restored. They are traces of a world that was swept away without ever being truly understood. To defend them is not to mythologize them, but to resist the idea that history is a linear, innocent process.

Pasolini knows that what has been destroyed will not return. Precisely for this reason, he insists on naming it. Because only what is named can continue to disrupt the triumphant narrative of progress.

His antimodernity proposes no alternatives. It exposes a loss. And in that exposure lies its force.

Beyond Categories: Heresy as Destiny

Pasolini is often said to stand “beyond left and right.” But this formula, if left unexamined, can be misleading. Pasolini does not transcend political categories because he considers them outdated, but because he destabilizes them from within.

His position is heretical in the deepest sense: it does not found a new order, does not propose a new orthodoxy. It lives in fracture. It accepts isolation as the price of truth. It rejects any allegiance that offers protection.

For this reason, Pasolini cannot be inherited like a systematic thinker. He does not leave behind a school, nor does he construct a tradition. He leaves behind a methodical unease, a way of looking at the present without justifying it.

Legacy as Burden

To inherit Pasolini means to accept an ungrateful task: to continue asking questions without the guarantee of an answer. It means resisting the temptation to use him as cultural validation. It means enduring the discomfort his work still provokes.

Every attempt to “recover” him for an identity function fails, because it presupposes what Pasolini always refused: pacification. Pasolini does not pacify. He exposes. He accuses. He leaves things uncovered.

His legacy is not what comforts, but what prevents us from feeling innocent. Not what orients, but what destabilizes.

Pasolini remains, now more than ever, a figure radical. Without armies, without institutions, without official heirs. His strength does not lie in his ability to found, but in his ability to disarticulate the certainties of the present.