RAFAEL SA ́NCHEZSuch laughter does not affect this or that political party, personality, or entity: rather,
it afflicts the political as such. From left to right, and right down the middle, such compre-
hensive laughter envelops the entire political topography, delivering it over to a scary,
unfathomable otherness. Regardless of any informing ideologies, or of the actors’ desires,
worries, or programmatic intentions, it eventually overtakes every site where the political
is at all enunciated, leaving them all encompassed by a troubling, advancing obscurity,
the night of not knowing where every (postpolitical?) initiative is being tried out. It may
even be said that this laughter is the anonymous sound that the theologico-political makes
in its irrepressible retreat. In Venezuela it is so prevalent than one local caricaturist goes
so far as to suggest that, if prices keep going down, ‘‘comicalness’’ may eventually overtake
oil as the nation’s most profitable export item.^45 Moreover, in Venezuela such laughter
affects the opposition perhaps even more than it does the government. Bereft of any
credible leadership, organization, or program and affected even more than the regime by
the institutional debacle of recent years, the opposition, in its urgency to get rid of Cha ́vez,
often abruptly descends from the heights of tragedy into the lowly bosom of comedy. If
the circumstances were not the uncertain mess that they presently are, it might even be
said that he who laughs last laughs best, with the government uttering the final, deafening
laughter before the sorry spectacle of the opposition’s many trials and tribulations.
F I G U R E 7 ‘‘If oil prices
continue to go down, we will
have to increase exports in
humor.’’ (Caricature by
Rayma,El Universal,
November 6, 2001.)PAGE 418418.................16224$ CH21 10-13-06 12:37:18 PS