Paolo Guzzanti
Mignottocrazia

Never before in recent months has my mailbox on DeBaser been clogged with requests from site users asking me to comment and objectively assess the events related to the so-called "Rubygate," which - akin to Nixon-era "Watergate" - might impose an interpretation of recent Italian history and influence the developments of political dialectics, decreeing the collapse of Berlusconism and the advent of new parliamentary and governmental majorities.

I confess that the requested task was (and is) daunting, involving a reinterpretation of the system in light of heterogeneous categories, such as morality, gender relations, the modes of women's emancipation concerning their self-determination and the possibility of exploiting, even for economic purposes, their freedom: if, as Isabel Allende emphasizes and as the story of Moll Flanders warns us, every female emancipation passes through economic independence, then even the exploitation of one's body, or specific parts of it, can be, whether the woman is called Diotima, Sappho or - hypothetically - Ruby, Nicole, Maryshtelle or otherwise, a troubled, complex and respectable stage of this path of liberation and growth.

More generally, it is necessary to interpret the destinies of a charismatic power, as certainly is Berlusconi's, based on image, message, body language, and the very physicality of the political leader: a leader who, unlike the ancient teachings of a Machiavelli, according to whom the tyrant must be feared (and hated) to strengthen his power, tries in every way to be loved and to weave with the Nation's body - almost as if it were a female body and an otherness to be seduced - a loving relationship, an identification and empathy based on sensuality and fullness of senses, as his being born (Jungianly) under the sign of Libra, dominated by Venus, indeed imposes on him.

That this identification and empathy that only Berlusconi can weave with the body of the Italian Nation is one of the possible keys to his success seems obvious to me, without needing to add much to what I observed in my essay last June.

That the affective and sensual dimension of Berlusconism (the fact that Berlusconi is not simply "supported" or "endured" by his majority but is loved by his voters, and especially voters) distances him from any theoretical model of a "tyrant," according to traditional political science categories, seems equally evident to me.

This leads to the conclusion that his charismatic leadership is something deeply modern, and modernly profound, in the current socio-political context, detaching itself from any historical precedent, projecting into a "future" that, in some ways, is already "now".

Almost suggesting to us that every future leader will have to be loved before being understood; to seduce before convincing; to satisfy the emotional needs of the people who make up the electorate body before their rational ones; to place themselves, in relation to various age groups and electorates, in an emotional dimension: now embodying the devoted son (elderly), now the eloquent partner (peers), now the companion of gallant adventures (peers), now the munificent parent (young people), always and in any case the brotherly friend with whom to celebrate sports victories, with whom to enjoy the aesthetic pleasure given by a theatrical performance, a song, a film, a TV program, the purchase of a book, or simply the contemplation of beauty in its fullest sense and in its pure Being, represented - in the normal case - by female beauty as a synthesis of the best that life can offer us here and now.

It is therefore no coincidence that, sealing what I have observed, the same political leader often laments the fact of not being loved and reciprocated by a section of the population, even though it has been meager in recent years and never openly and effectively hostile to him (undergoing him rather than opposing him: hence the Freudian metaphors of an Altan, the well-known joke about the love nights of mamma Rosa and papa Luigi, the search for new political "narratives" that clearly highlight the almost childish condition in which this section of the electorate lies).

Nor will it be a coincidence that astute political notists like Giuliano Ferrara explicitly talk about Him as "our love", or that journalists like Minzolini are ridiculed by opponents for their loyalty to a certain concept of Italy by resorting to analogies with dog-like affection, in the same way, that years ago Emilio Fede was maliciously - and once again: childishly - renamed "Emilio Fido".

If the key word to understand the phenomenon is thus love, the sometimes ambiguous ambivalent relationship that is created between lovers comes into play - the conflicting and dialectic dimension implicit in the affective relationship as the need for "recognition," in the explicitly existential sense of the term - and, with it, the claim underlying every betrayed love: the limits of the current climate and the same limits within which the excellent, incisive, informed, mischievous, heartfelt book by Guzzanti moves then become evident.

Written by a person who had deeply believed in Berlusconi (even risking his life in the context of the well-known "Mitrokhin affair") the book is also the claim of a person betrayed in his affections and in the hope of recognition, even before in the liberal-conservative political conviction; at the same time, by enhancing the betrayed's perspective, it inevitably tends to color the semantics of the traitor's actions towards the world related to prostitution and, more generally, the exercise of sexual self-determination which reinforces the sense of exclusion of those suffering, the reification of the sentiment of those who do not see themselves recognized in the integrity of their Being.

Thus, the biting neologism "mignottocrazia" assumes another hue, and the same "Ruby scandal" should be understood in the symbolic and political key of a Country that, ultimately, demands to be recognized in its otherness and in the satisfaction of its needs, demands to be loved precisely at the moment it denies love.

For the average users of the site: like the lover, in calling the adulterous beloved "no good," demands to be loved; like the beloved, in communicating their contempt and justifying their conduct, implicitly communicates a need for affection; like the same atheist, in denying any possible divine love, ultimately manifests the lack and need for a transcendent dimension; so the critics of Berlusconi, opposing him, ask him for recognition: because - paraphrasing Gaber - Berlusconi is part of them.

Thus, beyond the discourse being pursued, the criminal implications involving the Prime Minister's associations remain regarding which nothing can be said, nor, following this categorization, is there any interest in discussing them, except by once again understanding their dialectic dimension, connected to a further need for "recognition" of a fidelity transposed and abstracted onto institutional relations, but always striving to claim the lack of attention of the beloved and the disappointment or anger that follows.

It's not that, with this discourse, one intends to relativize and divert the reader from the same President's faults.

Throughout the affair, the limits of Berlusconism appear indeed evident, and his political story seems probably incomplete: if Berlusconi had satisfied everyone's needs, not just those of a part; if he had made himself loved also by the left, not just the center-right; if he had not opposed face-to-face with PCI-PDS-DS-PD but had positioned himself, in '94, as a leader of a center looking both at AN-Lega and, by reassessing common socialist roots, at the left area, things would have turned out differently for everyone, and even the betrayed lovers would have seen in him that synthesis of opposites that the love metaphor forces us to follow to its ultimate outcome, and therefore up to the totalizing dimension, in a vision of the whole where lover and beloved blend and are themselves one single thing: almost as if Berlusconi is the whole of Italy, almost as if united Italy coincides, in this centenary, with Berlusconi.