Pasolini’s Transhumanising Vision. Otherwise than the Traps of identity”,

Today’s world, present day society is the “text” more than “context”, elected as the object of reflection in these pages. Pasolini and his artworks, his literary and filmic writing in particular, are the “pre-text”. Our approach, in fact, is inspired by Pasolini. His focus is oriented critically beyond deceptive reassurance as imposed by the order of discourse, concerned with living together beyond the boundaries of closed identity; he highlights how literary writing and artistic discourse in general enhance perception, expression and understanding. These are the “places” of resistance in front of the forces of monologisation/homologation characteristic of the global communication world and its normalising standards, the mortal traps of identity. Identity is characterised by a tendency to expel the other, provoked by a constant feeling of fear of the other whether in the sense of the object genitive or the subject genitive. On the contrary, Pasolini’s artwork evidences the transhumanising capacity associated above all to the feminine, to non-indifference towards the other, to fear for the other, to responsibility at the basis of the continuity of life itself, that is without reciprocity. This text is structured around the following themes: the recurring obsession with identity and its obsolescence; semiotics and semioticians on identity: Umberto Eco and Charles Morris; identity in the art of discourse and in the discourse of art; otherwise than identity: alterity and singularity; identity and its fragmentation in Pasolini’s Petrolio; practicing semiotics through writing, literary and filmic; the “feminine” in Pasolini’s artwork; Medea, the extra-communitarian; the discomfort of inescapable responsibility for the other; between two identity worlds; for a semioethics of alterity; references.