Specters are haunting Italy: Left -wing terrorism and the tragic plot of the Moro Affair in Italian culture, theater, and film

This study examines the representation of a scorching episode of Italian postwar history: Aldo Moro\u27s 1978 abduction and assassination by the left-wing terrorist group Brigate Rosse. It shows how Italian culture comes to terms with the recurrent appearance of the ghostly figure of Moro in several fictional and non-fictional venues that haunt the country\u27s historical memory. Freud\u27s notion of the work of mourning, Derrida\u27s politics of spectrality, and White\u27s theory of narrative history provide the theoretical background for the analysis of the manifestations of this traumatic event, elaborated in order to rebuild a collective cultural identity and purge it of complicity with terrorism. Highlighting the centrality and the persistence of the specter of Moro in Italian culture, this work illustrates how over the years the representation of the Moro Affair has split into two different fictional modes, which mirror the subjective nature of the concept and the hybridism of Italian terrorism: the tragic palinode and the mystery story. The tragic palinode, modeled on anthropological and theatrical interpretations of mythic archetypes, performs a collective rite of mourning through which an entire generation both takes responsibility for terrorism and simultaneously abjures it. In contrast, the mystery story casts the event as a transnational conspiracy aimed at blocking the rise of Communism in Italy thus absolving an entire sector of Italian society of the allegation of political violence. These conflicting representations mirror the clash of political and cultural forces in Italian society, and offer new insight into the self-construction of an Italian national self, suggesting that this identity is grounded in the foundational myth of the Resistance, while concurrently haunted by the specters of revolutionary Marxism. Combining a theoretical and historical reconstruction of the event, this study offers an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of two case studies, both examples of the tragic palinode: Marco Baliani\u27s drama Corpo di Stato and Marco Bellocchio\u27s feature film Buongiorno, notte