NOTES TO PAGES 404–13which that distant episode had for the local political theology. It is in this precise sense that I say
this incident, from which the regine has never quite recovered, continues to haunt the present.
Even if I am not sure that I have succeeded in doing so, I am grateful to Birgit Meyer for insisting
that I clarify how, precisely, the incident keeps contagiously inflecting Venezuela’s present
predicament.
- Roger Santodomingo,TalCual, January 11, 2001.
- Pablo Aure, ‘‘Generales en pantaletas,’’El Nacional, January 30, 2001.
- Teodoro Petkoff, ‘‘La noche de la pantaleta,’’TalCual, January 12, 2001; Carlos Vicente
Torrealba, ‘‘La noche de las pantaletas,’’Venezuela Analı ́tica, 2001. - Pablo Aure, ‘‘Generales en pantaletas.’’
- Of panties in these earlier incidents, one may say what Pietz says of the fetish. For him,
the fetish is ‘‘ ‘territorialized’ in material space’’; likewise, panties are located in the irreducibly
material domains of privacy. They are also ‘‘personalized,’’ evoking an intensely passionate individ-
ual response that, going well beyond any collective significance that these objects may have in the
culture, is largely ‘‘incommensurate’’ with it. (See William Pietz, ‘‘The Problem of the Fetish,’’ pt.
1,Res9 (Spring 1985):12–13). In this respect, one might say that, in their strong interpellating
capacity, much like surrealistobjets trouve ́s, fetishes, in this case the panties, are firmly rooted in the
modern economy of the subject. Not only that, but they are indispensable to the workings of such
an economy. It is a crucial argument of this essay that, unlike the earlier episodes, in the latest
Venezuelan incident concerning panties, it is this economy, and in it the very status of panties as
fetish, that is placed under erasure—i.e., not put behind or overcome as something once and for all
relegated to the past but rather destabilized or, more precisely, deconstructed. - I am, of course, here loosely invoking Lacan to refer not to any actually given evolutionary
stage but to the kind of retroactive hallucinations that all subjects presumably undergo after enter-
ing the ‘‘symbolic’’ order. - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy,Retreating the Political, ed. and trans.
Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), 3. - ‘‘Militares enjuician al abogado Pablo Aure,’’El Nacional, January 10, 2001.
- ‘‘Liberado el Profesor Pablo Aure pero el juicio militar continu ́a,’’El Nacional, January 11,
17.TalCual, January 11, 2001.
- ‘‘Pantaletas van y pantaletas vienen,’’TalCual, January 12, 2001.
- Angel Bermudez, ‘‘Conspiracio ́n Boba,’’El Universal, January 12, 2001.
- Antonio Lo ́pez Ortega, ‘‘Prendas,’’El Nacional, January 27, 2001. Although I am citing
this author’s text in a context that somewhat ironically brings out some unexpected possibilities, as
witnessed by his many newspaper articles, essays, short stories, and novels, it is surely testimony to
his many gifts as a writer that this can so fruitfully be done. - ‘‘Subio ́cotizacio ́n de pantaletas,’’TalCual, January 12, 2001.
- Jean-Luc Nancy,Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne O’Byrne
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2. - Ibid., 2–3.
- Ibid., 3.
- Ibid., 5.
- Jacques Derrida,Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 99.
- For Bolivar’s status in Venezuela’s political imaginary, see Rafael Sa ́nchez, ‘‘Dancing Jacob-
ins: A Genealogy of Latin American Populism (Venezuela)’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Am-
sterdam, 2004), 387–438.
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