MIL ET UNE (RÉ)ÉCRITURE Postponing Death by Self-Rewriting in Potocki and Pasolini

The paper aims to provide an analysis of the practice of rewriting and its protean implications in terms of both political statement and strategy for literary renovating by covering Jan Potocki’s masterpiece The Manuscript found in Saragossa [2008] and Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio [1997] in the light of One Thousand and One Night. In first place I will briefly illustrate the genesis of the Potocka - the 1804 and the 1810 compilations - and its fortune and reception along the last two centuries as well as the plagiarisms and rewritings that this novel suffered after its author’s death. Thereafter, I will show the analogies between the Manuscript and the conception, assembling and fate of Petrolio which was first published in 1992 - seventeen years after Pasolini’s death – and that in the author’s purpose was meant to be “an inedited monumental text […] of which exist at least four manuscripts - two of them are apocrypha - that concord and discord one with the other”, although there is no record that the Italian artist never happen to know the life and work of the Polish author. I will therefore explore the notion of rewriting in Pasolini’s last years - i.e. the re-edition of his 1954 collection of dialectal poems The Best of Youth published in 1975 with the title The New Youth – in order to provide a bio-bibliographical base for the author’s intentional practice of plagiarism and parody which occurred to range from the Greek myths to Dostoevsky, from political pamphlets to newspaper articles. Once proven the structural similarities and the affinities of contents in both the novels, I will resort to Agamben’s conception of “parody” [1993] - as formulated in Stanzas - and furthermore to Foucault’s reinterpretation of the “hypomnema” - as stated in the last lectures given at the College de France [2008; 2009] - to prove how in both Potocki and Pasolini rewriting also worked as a way of self-writing related to a practice of “minor biopolitic”; how in both the writers, it occurred to undermined the notion of authorship and, tout court, of a static representation of the self as it normally occurs in most of the cases occurs in the Western Modern tradition [Borges, 1984; W.S. Burroughs, 1962]. In the end, I will show how rewriting was, for both the authors in question, a way to procrastinate a deadline and, by doing so, postponing their own death, page after page and day after day by intertwining and reformulating stories, as the legendary figure of Scheherazade used to do along the Arabian nights.  

 SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY G. Agamben, Stanzas : Word and Phantasm in Western Culture , University of Minnesota Press , 1993. J. L. Borges, “The Thousand and One Nights”, tr. Eliot Weinberger, in The Georgian Review (Fall 1984): 564-574 W.S. Burroughs, “Operation Rewrite”, in The ticket that exploded, Paris, Olympia Press, 1962. M. Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres I, Paris, Gallimard, 2008; Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II : Le Courage de la vérité, Paris, Gallimard, 2009. P. P. Pasolini, Petrolio, a novel, Pantheon, New York, 1997. I. Potocki, Le manuscript trouvé à Saragosse - Version de 1804 et de 1810, Paris, Flammarion, 2008. VV.AA. Le "Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse" et ses intertextes, Actes du colloque, Louvain, Peeters, 2001

SHORT BIOGRAPHY After graduating in Modern languages and literatures at the University of Padua, in 2007 I was awarded of a scholarship for a PhD program in Comparative Literatures and History of Art between the University of Bergamo and the University of Paris 7 - Diderot. At the moment I am carrying on my academic researches between the University of Padua and the University of Paris 4 - Sorbonne. I am the author of several publication concerning Marcel Duchamp, Pier Paolo Pasolini, William Burroughs, Carmelo Bene and Antonin Artaud. Aside of the academic career, I worked for the Italian Cultural Institute in Krakow (2006) and for the Publication office of the European Commission in Luxembourg (2011), I worked for the celebrated Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company and participated to the organization of several editions of its Literary festivals. I also correspond for some Italian newspapers and literary magazines and newspaper, such as Il Sole 24 Ore and Satisfiction.