Pétrole

"This poem is the poem of the obsession with identity and, at the same time, its crushing." Petrole is Pasolini's last work, published seventeen years after his assassination. Despite its unfinished nature, the collection is often presented as the synthesis of all his work, the sum of all his lived experiences. According to Sylvain Creuzevault, the work offers itself as a "continuity of force(s), in a discontinuity of forms": a work whose gaps and lacunae are not the result of a lack, but bear witness to Pasolini's fundamental refusal to constitute a coherent, unified work - just like his own thought, criss-crossed by doubles and antagonisms. The object of numerous critical re-readings, Petrole seems to respond as much to the project of inventing a new novelistic form as to the political design of capturing, through the multiplicity of points of view, the Italy of the 1960s-70s, prey to "the strategy of tension". The book's fragmented writing thus takes the form of a series of juxtaposed notes, in which narrative snippets, symbolic visions, mystical fables, political reflections and the author's own aesthetic considerations follow one another with no apparent logic - all against the backdrop of an investigation: the mysterious causes of the assassination of oil giant Enrico Mattei.