This article reinterprets Pier Paolo Pasolini's metaphor of the disappeared fireflies through Giorgio Agamben's messianic time and Georges Didi-Huberman's ethics of seeing. It argues that the metaphor grounds not an elegy for loss, but a politics of the image. The faint, intermittent glow of the firefly becomes a model for a resistant visual practice that operates within the darkness of modernity, transforming catastrophe into a threshold for new forms of political witnessing and action.
This article explores the relationship between politics and institutionality in Hannah Arendt’s thought, focusing on the “foundational paradox,” that is, the (im)possibility of introducing the revolutionary spirit into the established political order. Through the analysis of Arendt and her commentators, three main responses are identified, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. The study offers keys to better understand Arendt’s dilemma and to face contemporary challenges in the relationship between politics and institutionality.
