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The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back

In politics, embodiment, figured as a literal connection between a national leader’s body and the nation as a whole, implies that the fates of leader and nation are linked; a decline in the leader’s body signals a corresponding decline in the national body politic. This concrete, physical idea of embodiment emerged from a context of absolutist monarchical power and has been most influentially described in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies as both theological and premodern. Nevertheless the temptation persists to describe the power and influence populists hold over their followers in the contemporary moment in just this way. Focusing on the specific context of US presidential politics, this chapter questions whether ideas of literal embodiment can usefully explain how populist politics operates through performance. With regard to the ways in which we interpret the significance of politicians’ bodies in twenty-first-century US politics, the chapter explores the process through which premodern political embodiment was supplanted by more abstractly conceived political representation. It is argued that, rather than postulating a radical break between mainstream politics and the mode of representation that is enacted by populists, explorations of embodiment need to take into account historical continuities as politicians’ embodied performances engage with the collective memory of political audiences and thereby complicate processes of political representation. As such, embodiment must be understood as one of the central repertoires of affective, metalingual engagement through which performances in contemporary politics act upon political audiences.