CRASSH

Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in a newspaper article published in 1974 that a return to Edenic origins was “the only possible alternative to the end of the world.” A major strand in Italian public discourse was picking up in the late 1960s, the dialectic between Arcadia and Apocalypse, namely, the nexus between the “end of the Christian Arcadia” (Pietro Citati) on the one hand, and the “catastrophist” attitude of Italian intellectuals on the other (Paolo Rossi). Rossi, in an essay published in 1988, distinguished in fact between “Arcadia and Apocalypse” and argued that in Italy both apocalyptics and people nostalgic of Arcadia had joined forces and had fostered “movements in which angst for a possible and imminent end …manage to co-exist pretty well with the image of a lost, rustic heaven, as well as with a nature which is deemed good and unspoiled.” This paper picks up on a theme raised by Norberto Bobbio in an article published in 1948, in which he argued that “the theme of the ‘return to origins,’ considered as a return to a pristine simplicity, or as the fond revelation of a condition of innocence before and outside history, is a typical feature of a decaying society” (Bobbio 1948: 365).

The paper shows how the implicit praise of a political Arcadia involved in claims of an imminent end of the world, underlie the discourse of several Italian intellectuals, philosophers and novelists during the 1970s and 1980s. The paper explores the structure of his arcadic-apocalyptic strand and tries to expose the philosophical and theological underpinnings, namely, the underlying conception of time and the attendant notions of salvation, redemption, and fulfillment.