Georges Didi – Huberman, COME LE LUCCIOLE. UNA POLITICA DELLA SOPRAVVIVENZA, 2010

Every living thing emits photon streams. However, there are tiny ones for which light – released by a chemical, luciferin – is a wedding parade, a dance of love. A cluster of five thousand fireflies barely produces the glow of a candle. Yet that fragile grace, that phosphorescent vaulting that dot the dark lent itself to apocalyptic considerations. “I would give the whole Montedison for a firefly,” wrote Pasolini in 1975. An ancient fascination, his, which dated back to the war years, when he ecstatically observed “an immense quantity of fireflies, which made thickets of fire in thickets of bushes” . Their disappearance appeared to him as a cultural genocide, the latest crime of a new fascism worse than the previous one: neocapitalism, with its dazzling artificial brilliance. Since then, speaking of fireflies has been tantamount to alluding, by way of metaphor, to the features of the human world which risk eclipsing the irreversible advance of social stereotypy. There are dangers for “firefly men”, “firefly words”, “firefly images”, “firefly knowledge”. But are they really doomed to be lost? In his book, Georges Didi-Huberman captures what despair prevented Pasolini from seeing: that barbarism does not proceed smoothly; that putting on ruin altogether obscures the glimmers that resist despite everything; that closing in mourning for the archaic paralyzes the intelligence of the present.