Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Chávez Regime?

Intimate Publicities Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Chávez Regime? Rafael Sánchez Para Edmundo Bracho y Diómedes Cordero The current space of sovereignty . . . , which is also the space of the finishing of identity in general, is solely a distended space full of holes, where nothing can come to presence. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural On January 10, 2001, television screens across Venezuela filled with an extraordinary image: surrounded by a forest of microphones and journalists , the nation’s Defense Prime Minister, General Ismael Eliécer Hurtado Soucre, suddenly produced and held up in his right hand a pair of lightly colored women’s panties, which he waved at the cameras while delivering a volley of fiery accusations against enemies of the regime . In the wake of the avid succession of flash pans that greeted the general’s press-conference revelations, and after brief hesitation, most members of the audience burst into irrepressible laughter. Soon that laughter would be echoed all over the globe. Carried by local television and newspapers, the electronically reproduced image of the general and his panties instantly traveled everywhere, so that, at least for some brief, discontinuous moments, the most distant points of the planet burst into globalized laughter at the unintended prank of this South American general. Or so, at any rate, I like to imagine General Hurtado’s worldwide reception. Whatever happened elsewhere, in Venezuela the laughter still resonates, and it is anyone’s guess how long its waves will keep rippling into the future. I argue in this essay that the general’s colored panties blew a gaping hole in the theologico-political balloon of the Venezuelan Chávez re4 01 RAFA EL SÁ N C HE Z F I G U R E 2 ‘‘The minister has assured the public that the army has received 140 panties in as many different colors.’’ (El Universal, January 11, 2001.) 4 02 INTIMATE PUBLICITIES gime, which keeps growing bigger day by day. Even if by one or another spectacular means the regime constantly puffs itself up, since that moment its theologico-political substance has not ceased leaking through this hole. Indeed, if things continue as they are, one Schmittian scenario would be a total collapse of the political amid proliferating con- flicts. As Schmitt and others after him have argued, given the world’s radical indeterminacy , the political can only come about as the result of constantly reiterated, inherently violent decision. Akin to the miracle in a certain theological tradition, such a decision, the sovereign exception, makes both lawful regularity and the political community possible. Thoroughly transcendent to the political, this decision brings it into being as a more or less delineated, cohesive totality, while designating the enemies or enemy vis-à-vis which the political totality defines itself.1 Given such an understanding of how, in all its seriousness and gravity, the political totality comes about, I now wish to consider the opposite, largely comical possibility, that is not how totalization happens or how it triumphantly succeeds but rather how, precipitated by laughter, it hilariously fails. Considering the awesome, transcendent force that goes into the making of the political community—the sheer constructivist bent of the decision that so deliberately puts it together as an articulated, ordered totality—it is not surprising that laughter can have a wondrous effect. After all, according to Bataille, ‘‘laughter exposes the relation between reason and unreason,’’ in an eruptive moment of excess that momentarily reveals the unknown that dwells within the known, ruining from within any reasonable construct, in this case the state.2 As Bataille puts it, ‘‘that which is laughable may simply be the unknowable ,’’ and ‘‘the unknown makes us laugh.’’3 Simon Critchley offers a related way of understanding how laughter and, more generally, the comic expose the boundaries of any objectivity to an ineradicable alterity. For him, humor issues from a ‘‘disjunction . . . between expectations and actuality,’’ which, defeating ‘‘our expectations’’ about reality or causality, produces ‘‘a novel actuality.’’ ‘‘The comic world,’’ Critchley writes, ‘‘is the world with its causal chains broken, its social practices turned inside out, and commonsense rationality left in tatters.’’ The Venezuelan instance may be confidently added to Critchley ’s list of examples of such subversive disjunction between expectations and actuality, from ‘‘talking dogs’’ to ‘‘farting professors and incontinent ballerinas.’’4 Indeed, given our everyday expectations about generals, what could be more jarringly discrepant...