“Gettare il Proprio Corpo Nella Lotta”: Pasolini, Civil Passion and Phraseology

The relationship between Pier Paolo Pasolini and the United States of Ameri-ca passes through the Italian poet’s brief experience in New York in the summer of 1966, an experience that is marked by the fundamental role of phraseology, and in particular by an “harmless verse of a song of the Black Resistance”, to use Pasolini’s own words: gettare il proprio corpo nella lot-ta. Our talk is aimed at focusing on the origin of the motto, on its semantic evolution, which develops between the poetic phrase and the political slo-gan, on its widespread presence in Pasolini’s works and on the fortune of some equivalents in other languages and in English, such as You gotta throw your body into the fight or Throwing the body into the fight, that are used both in contemporary protest movements and in other contexts, for example in reference to the body as an instrument of political art.