Berlusconi e Macron: figure per esplorare l’ipermoderno Un’analisi de Il Duca di Mantova di Franco Cordelli e Un personnage de roman di Philippe Besson

L’articolo analizza Il Duca di Mantova di Franco Cordelli e Un personnage de roman di Philippe Besson. In questi testi, gli autori si confrontano rispettivamente con la figura di Silvio Berlusconi ed Emmanuel Macron. Attraverso la categoria di ‘ipermoderno’, l’articolo intende studiare alcuni tratti del potere contemporaneo: in una prima parte, si analizzerà lo statuto ontologico dei testi e le modalità usate per mescolare elementi di finzione a dati reali; successivamente, si mostrerà quali immagini del potere emergono dai due politici rappresentati; in conclusione, andando oltre i testi, si cercherà di definire il concetto di ‘Leviatano-ologramma’, al fine di fornire nuovi strumenti concettuali per decostruire l’immaginario politico contemporaneo.

Celebrity meets Populism in Europe: The Political Performances of Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi

Throughout the world, celebrity and populism have become formidable combinations in supporting political leadership. The rise of these phenomena has provoked much debate and has led to the examination of the features, causes and consequences of this kind of politics. Celebrity politics is a reflection of both the influence of celebrities and the power of celebrity images in the media which see politicians becoming celebrities, deliberately or accidentally. The political rise and fall of Nicholas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi and their roles in the performances associated with political leadership furnish two case studies of celebrity and populism in France and Italy respectively. This paper examines these two “presidential-style” leaders in Europe who at first seemedadept in practising aspects of both celebrity and populist politics.

Reading Graffiti in Naples and Reading Naples in Film

This article examines graffiti in Naples between 2016 and 2018, arguing for its political importance. My thesis is that erasing graffiti from garbage trucks does not remove the social problems that caused it. Though sometimes seen as an eye-sore by tourists, graffiti offers vital information about the struggles and passions within the city itself. Under Silvio Berlusconi, rubbish became gold, as Camorra member Nunzio Perella stated when arrested in 1992. Three films, Biùtiful cauntri (2007), Gomorrah (2008), and Napoli Jungle (Bagnoli Jungle) (2015) document how toxic waste dumping affected three generations of Italians and continues to be a pervasive problem.

NEOFASIZMUS OLASZORSZÁGBAN?

A tanulmány azt vizsgálja, hogy a fasizmus ideológiája, amely a huszadik század első felében hosszú ideig (1922–1943) meghatározta Olaszország politikai berendezkedését, az utóbbi évtizedekben és napjainkban hogyan él tovább. A neofasiszta mozgalmak már az I. Olasz Köztársaság kikiáltását (1946) követően, a Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) megalapításával megjelentek. Az MSI-nek több utódpártja is alakult az 1990-es években, amelyek közül a legjelentősebb a Gianfranco Fini által alapított Alleanza Nazionale (1995), amely 2009-ben egyesült a Silvio Berlusconi által vezetett Forza Italiával (Popolo della Libertà). Ennek feloszlása során a kilépő tagok megalapították a napjainkban is aktív Fratelli d’Italia – Alleanza Nazionale elnevezésű pártot, amelynek elnöke Giorgia Meloni. A tanulmány röviden bemutatja az említett pártok főbb elveit, majd azt a kérdést állítja középpontjába, hogy vajon a Fratelli d’Italia programját tekintve mennyiben tekinthető neofasiszta pártnak?

Shameless normalisation of impoliteness: Berlusconi’s and Trump’s press conferences

This paper applies the notions of impoliteness and shameless normalisation to potentially impolite behaviours produced by Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi in official press conferences. Press conferences, as an activity type, involve relatively clear expectations and norms, so that impolite behaviours theoretically constitute particularly salient violations. We present two case studies involving racist and misogynist insults on the part of Berlusconi and Trump, respectively, analysed in their co-textual, interactional, socio-political as well as historical contexts. We describe the kinds of impoliteness that each politician employs, without any apology, and argue that they involve violations of the traditional moral order that are part of a far-right populist agenda of shameless normalisation. In each case, we examine comments posted in response to YouTube videos of each incident and provide evidence of polarised responses, but with substantial proportions expressing positive evaluations. We observe that impoliteness affords the possibility of presenting authentic and hyper-masculine identities and finish by reflecting on the implications of our findings for the local and global political and cultural landscape.

The Rise of Algorithm Populism

This chapter scrutinizes the political career of comedian-cum-politician Beppe Grillo, who founded the Five Star Movement, an algorithm party that currently co-rules Italy. It explores how Italy shifted from the glossy prepackaged world of Silvio Berlusconi toward a grassroots, Internet-driven, and algorithmic political movement. It also describes the Five Star Movement as a protest movement on populism, antipolitics, and anarchism. The chapter discusses Grillo's deployment of supernatural humor and political suspicion, as well as his otherworldly humor and cynical hypotheses that speak to brewing cultural and economic anxieties. It refers to Grillo's theories that offer citizens a scapegoat or an alternative explanation for Italy's socioeconomic crises and the labor of the supernatural.

The Truth Society

This book seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. The book scrutinizes Italy's late-twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, the book examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving. With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the “post-truth” world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. The book argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. This book offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

Manifest Disguise and Mediatized Politics

This chapter concentrates on a mystery of late-twentieth-century Italy, which recounts how Silvio Berlusconi enchanted citizens and dominated Italian politics for nearly twenty years despite widely shared agreement on his corruption and ineptitude. It analyses how a dazzling political culture changes how Italians discerned what counted as accurate and reliable information, and which actors might be trusted to offer the facts. It also focuses on Striscia la Notizia, one of the world's first fake news programs, and its plush mascot Gabibbo, a human-sized red puppet who is praised as a civil defender. The chapter uses Gabibbo to unravel why Italy became a site in which puppets talking politics were more reliable than puppet-like politicians. It suggests that postwar political spectacle gave way to a widespread popular cynicism capable of simultaneously propelling former prime minister Berlusconi's peculiar popularity and puppets seen as truth-tellers.

“All the Demagogue’s Men”

This chapter revolves around “media demagogues”: politicians who rely on their mastery of the media, and on recurrent lies, as they exploit the electorate’s worst fears and prejudices to gain and retain power. The rise of media demagogues produces integrity complexity for the political actors who surround them, including both political operatives who are considering whether to serve the demagogue, and fellow politicians, who are considering whether to ally with him. From the perspective of both of these kinds of political actors, it may appear as if integrity’s dictates are indeterminate. Should one wash one’s hands clean of the demagogue in the name of personal integrity, or collaborate with him to limit the threats he poses to the polity’s collective integrity? Taking up the cases of Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the chapter shows how the integrity framework can offer a systematic solution to this problem.