NOTES TO PAGES 416–23- Geoffrey Bennington,Dudding: Des noms de Rousseau(Paris: Galile ́e, 1991),73.
- Sa ́nchez, ‘‘Dancing Jacobins,’’ 387–438.
- Michael McCaughan,The Battle of Venezuela(London: Latin America Bureau, 2004), 54.
- Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ’’ inDeconstruc-
tion and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67 - Jason Smith, ‘‘Introduction: Nancy’s Hegel, the State, and Us,’’ in Nancy,Hegel, ix.
- This caricature is from a time before oil had reached the extravagant prizes that it enjoys
today. - Oswaldo Barreto, ‘‘Soberanı ́as menguadas,’’TalCual, April 17, 2002.
- Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘Populismo y transformacio ́n del imaginario polı ́tico en Ame ́rica Latina,’’
Boletin de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 42(Amsterdam: Cedla, 1987), 25–38. - Rafael Sa ́nchez, ‘‘Channel Surfing: Media, Mediumship, and State Authority in the Marı ́a
Lionza Possession Cult (Venezuela),’’ inReligion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 388–434. - Jean-Luc Nancy,The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 111. - Roland Barthes,Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: The Noonday Press, 1993), 98. - Claudio Nazoa, ‘‘Se me fue la media,’’El Nacional, August 8, 2001.
- Michael Warner,Publics and Counterpublics(New York: Zone Books, 2002), 21–25, 62.
- Of the subject, i.e., of that which, as I have tried to suggest in this essay, is currently
undergoing strong deconstructive pressures in Venezuela. - Hannia Go ́mez, ‘‘El Coliseo,’’El Nacional, January 25, 2004; Fernando Rodrı ́guez, ‘‘Atra-
pados,’’TalCual, March 02, 2004. - Leopoldo Tablante, ‘‘De la ‘s’ a la ‘l,’ ’’El Nacional, June 26, 2002.
- I find this transition particularly fascinating because in it panties may be seen literally
shedding their status as fetishes to become something else. As the transition suggests, such a process
is, moreover, laden with momentous consequences not just for the subject but also, concomitantly,
for the topographical ordering of the world where such a subject had hitherto thrived. - Mario Perniola,The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World
(New York: Continuum, 2004); Nancy,Being Singular Plural,5–8. - After some thought, I decided to publish this essay basically as it was before the referen-
dum, without making any changes in light of that event. (I have added only a few sentences at the
very end about the status of the public/private divide in contemporary Venezuela, something that I
had always intended to do.) Even if some of the essay’s assertions betray the moment in which it
was written, by and large I believe that the majority of its conclusions still hold. The decision to
leave the paper as is also issued from my belief that, with all its possible insights and shortcomings,
it should stand as testimony both to the moment in which it was written and to the possible virtues
and—why not?—limits and limitations of the kind of analysis that I pursue. - I take this expression from the title of a somewhat hagiographic book on the Cha ́vez
presidency. See Richard Gott,In the Shadow of the Liberator(London: Verso, 2000). - The outcome was also helped by the government’s intense efforts. Backed by skyrocketing
oil prices in the international market, in the months preceding the referendum, the government
successfully used all its resources to alter how it was perceived among the general population.
Although a few months before the referendum a majority of opinion polls gave the government at
most 30 percent of the vote, with roughly another 30 percent going to the opposition and the
PAGE 748748.................16224$ NOTE 10-13-06 12:34:23 PS