Abstract

This paper considers the role played by political rituals in the construction of the form of contemporary italian politics. Assuming that actually political rituals differs from those performed in the past, because of their characters of "polisemy", "opening" and "extention", the hypothesis outlined here is that the global political frame in which plural forces and multiple rites creates their symbolic reality is a "liminal" one. In this global frame, political rituals are "opened" in the sense that the consequences of their performance are never fixed and sure as those in the past. Post-modern rites are also "concatenated": ritual structure creates new structure; proxemic ritual performed in "piazza" constructs fragments of media discourses; each ritual promotes a new opposite-ritual following a liturgical dynamism peculiar of the actual politics. It is argued that is starting from this global form, where rituals play on the double level of the discourse and of the body, that the meanings of each political action may be understood.