“War as a Permanent Civil War. The ‘Unfinished' History in Pasolini’s Petrolio”, in Labor imperfectus: Unfinished, Incomplete, Partial Texts in Classical Antiquity, De Gruyter, 2024 https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111340944/html

Abstract: The essay considers Petrolio as one of the most important Italian literary documents of the 1970s, a testimony of the unfolding of neocapitalism in postwar Italy portraying the multinational space of capital’s expansion, its ubiquitous relations with politics and power. The political manipulations of an explosive and divisive context such as the postwar Italian one are described by Pasolini as they were happening. Petrolio represented this sprawling colonial politics of development (“la politica dello sviluppo”), and denounced its connections with a structural violence against Italian civilians perpetrated within the new Italian State Power to eliminate any residual resistance opposing the expansion of neocapitalism and Anglo-American hegemony in the Mediterranean after the end of the Second World War.