Gesture and action in Pier Paolo Pasolini

Suspended between marginalization and integration with the system, at the end of the 1960s Pier Paolo Pasolini tries to redefine the intellectual’s space of action. He questions his own role as intellectual and specifies that he doesn’t want to align himself mechanically with the directives of neo-capitalism, but he doesn’t even give up on the action by preferring inertia, forcing himself as an «outcast» rejected by the system. On the contrary, he doesn’t hesitate to take action. However, it’s not a doing that excludes thinking, it’s not an act that is pure organizational pragma, mere technocratic action. Pasolini's engagement doesn’t forget the importance of the reflective moment, neglected by the protagonists of the protest movements. He is convinced that the intellectual should become an instrument of immediate and concrete action and tries a last, desperate, call to educational tension, an impulse, which, starting from the constant alternation between practice and theory, seems to deliver a decisive civil role to the educational/formative praxis.