Tra violenza e libertà. Per un’ iconologia politica della rivoluzione passiva fascista

This paper aims to reconsider Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution through the lens of a pivotal event in twentieth-century European history: the foundation of the Italian Fascist Empire on May 9, 1936. Drawing on a philological approach to the Prison Notebooks, the goal is to restore the theoretical richness of this category, often reduced to a mere synonym for "top-down modernization." Within this framework, the essay proposes a cross-reading of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis and Aby Warburg’s political iconology, bringing together two interpretive tools conceived to analyze historical crises and discontinuities. Special attention is given to Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and his treatment of the classical motif of the triumph, as a way to provide an iconological reading of mass mobilization in mature Fascism. The 1936 event is interpreted as a "plastic image" of a passive revolution, where the continuity of Western figurative memory intersects with the historical-political rupture of authoritarian modernity. Through this perspective, the concept of passive revolution is proposed as an epistemological lens capable of grasping the Sattelzeit between two opposing historical blocs, where apparent triumph conceals a profound hegemonic crisis.