Il passato al servizio di quale presente? Un’edizione critica dei Dialoghi di Confucio durante il pi Lin pi Kong (1974)

Compared to the earlier Cultural Revolution, the movement to criticise Lin Biao and Confucius, pi Lin pi Kong, remains under-researched, especially in more recent scholarship. This essay intends to contribute to the study of how the political objective of superimposing contemporary ideological struggles on pre-imperial philosophical trends resulted in a critical re-examination of the fundamental texts of the Chinese tradition of thought. In particular, the essay proposes an analysis of a critical edition of Confucius’ Analects published in 1974 and signed by the ‘worker-labourer-soldier students’ of the Faculty of Philosophy at Peking University. Setting off from the consideration that the pi Lin pi Kong campaign shared with the early stages of the Cultural Revolution a practice of exploiting historical disputes for the conduct of political battles in the present, the textual analysis of the edition aims to discuss how the categories of historical materialism were employed to offer a reinterpretation of Chinese philosophical history beyond (or in spite of) the stereotypical style of the time. The study aims to contribute to a more general investigation that touches upon the main political stakes between late 1973 and 1975, in particular how the Pi Lin pi Kong campaign condensed the various unresolved knots of the Cultural Revolution, demonstrating its limits and definitive reabsorption within the bureaucratic confines of the party-state itself.