More than a century after Marinetti published his justly famous founding manifesto of Italian futurism in Le Figaro, Pier Paolo Pasolini's claim that ‘Marinetti is an enigma’ still holds true. Whereas many would agree with Gottfried Benn that Marinetti's first futurist manifesto was also ‘the founding event of modern art in Europe’, the (ever-shifting) counterhegemonic myth subsequently put forth by the Italian writer, performer and impresario of futurism was at times so disturbing and all-embracing that even today it leaves readers wondering about Marinetti's motives, if not intelligence and sense of reality. One of the most discomforting aspects of his work is that it welcomed the Great War as a heavenly gift that would finally liberate Italy from the shackles of the past to give way to a new culture in which a truly innovative art could finally abide. Admittedly, it was not uncommon among modernists to regard the outbreak of the First World War as a moment that could lead to a new beginning in European history, to an inevitable cultural and political catharsis. However, Marinetti's texts published under the wartime state of exception suggest that he wanted the war to continue indefinitely – with the near total lack of irony in his oeuvre only adding to the scandal: ‘Irony! What irony! The old Italian Irony! … This is our enemy, which we must destroy’ (CW: 71). Marinetti, therefore, takes us to the darker contingent of avant-gardists working in states of exception.