Intimate Publicities
Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Cha ́vez Regime?Rafael Sa ́nchezPara Edmundo Bracho y Dio ́medes Cordero
The current space of sovereignty... , which is also the space of the finish-
ing of identity in general, is solely a distended space full of holes, where
nothing can come to presence.
—Jean-Luc Nancy,Being Singular PluralOn January 10, 2001, television screens across Venezuela filled with an
extraordinary image: surrounded by a forest of microphones and jour-
nalists, the nation’s Defense Prime Minister, General Ismael Elie ́cer
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 re-
gime. 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 world-
wide reception. Whatever happened elsewhere, in Venezuela the laugh-
ter 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 Cha ́vez re-
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