«“È lui il mio antagonista”. Pier Paolo Pasolini nell’opera di Walter Siti»

This article aims to analyse the problematic and ambivalent relationship that Walter Siti entertains with Pier Paolo Pasolini to highlight how this “attraversamento” represents a fundamental step in Siti’s poetics. Although the first encounter between the two authors takes place in literary criticism (Siti dedicated many years of his career to Pasolini as a critic, writing several essays on his work, editing the complete edition of his works for the “Meridiani” series and, in 2022, the critical edition of Petrolio), it is mainly in Siti’s literary writing that Pasolini’s influence comes to the fore. As I demonstrate, most of the contradictions that Siti detects in Pasolini’s thought and work as a critic is resolved in Siti’s literary writing. In his novels La magnifica merce and Troppi paradisi, Pasolini appears as a character who embodies an authority to be denied, a symbolic Father to be abjured. Pasolini is also present in Il contagio through the reexamination of some of his theoretical and sociological assumptions which are, however, disavowed and overturned by Siti.