The Lifting of the Body Politic. From mediated to medicated body: Berlusconi and plastic surgery

The paper intends to explore how Silvio Berlusconi’s body was represented by the media after he underwent plastic surgery in January 2004. Through a frame analysis of Italian print, I will try to identify the conditions of production and re-production of a body that, while complying to a continuous self-care process, has not only succumbed to the constraints of a “biopolitic of the body politic”, but has turned them to its own advantage into a propaganda spectacle extending to the very folds of its flesh. In full compliance with the so-called “media logic”, and at the moment when television insists on the “inner beauty” of the body as it undergoes plastic surgery (from the reality show Extreme Makeover to the fiction Nip/Tuck), also the natural body – or rather, the mediated body – of the body politic par excellence, i.e. Berlusconi’s body, has submitted itself to the “forever young” aesthetic creed, literally embodying the ancient motto, le Roi ne meurt jamais. Yet the photographs selected from the Italian print show the different images of Berlusconi’s body: the eternally young body gives way to the sick and unhealthy body, and, finally, to the grotesque body.