INTRODUCTIONinvisibility, of media coverage and secrecy, on the one hand, and a reimagining, with
the help of Benjamin, of ‘‘capitalism’’—yet another medium, vehicle, and refraction of
democracy—as itself already a ‘‘religion’’ or ‘‘cult,’’ indeed, a theatrical parading of
‘‘banknotes’’ with their ‘‘effigies,’’ on the other.
That the theatricalization of the theologico-political—designating others as ‘‘rogues’’
and inciting religious violence for near-cosmic causes—together with the deterritorializa-
tion or becoming more and more ‘‘global’’ and virtual of the forms and elements of faith,
may produce all too real and, indeed, visceral effects can be illustrated in many ways. A
further poignant example from the Americas is discussed by Rafael Sa ́nchez, who, in his
essay on Latin American populism—specifically, on the fate of the political and of politics
in contemporary Venezuela—demonstrates in what sense certain mediatic effects can pro-
duce an instant deflation of, indeed, blow ‘‘a gaping hole’’ in, what Sa ́nchez provocatively
characterizes as a ‘‘theologico-political balloon,’’ the Bolivarian republic of the Hugo Cha ́-
vez regime, in power since December 1998. Sa ́nchez evokes the hilarious media event that
epitomized—or triggered—the regime’s loss of auratic authority, shifting the overall tone
of public debate from deference to ridicule, as the military was put on the spot for its
alleged impotence via the (first anonymous, then televised) sending of women’s colored
lingerie: a fateful provocation, Sa ́nchez explains, whose violence is more symbolic than
physical, threatening ‘‘to blow the regime’s transcendental claims and illusions to smither-
eens’’ (p. 404). Yet another sample of an effective politics of scandal and insult, just as it
is one of sexual politics (or, rather, of using the sexual politically), the ‘‘panties episode’’
intervened in the public domain of a state whose ‘‘gendered identity and auratic authority
... are largely contingent upon its being demarcated from the domain of privacy and
feminine sexuality’’ (p. 408). The laughter thus provoked put all such demarcations, to-
gether with the collective and individual identities they vainly seek to establish, under
erasure or, at least, on the defensive.
As in an earlier essay, ‘‘Channel-Surfing: Media, Mediumship, and State Authority in
the Marı ́a Lionza Possession Cult (Venezuela),’’^150 and a forthcoming book,Dancing Ja-
cobins: A Genealogy of Latin American Populism (Venezuela),Sa ́nchez queries the useful-
ness of the concept of the theologico-political for our understanding of historical and
contemporary trends in Latin American politics. Turning our gaze from ‘‘the placid heav-
ens of philosophy’’ to the ‘‘hells of history,’’ Sa ́nchez proposes deploying sophisticated
theoretical concepts and modes of reasoning that underpin (accompany, and are in turn
enriched by) erudite historical and ethnographic analyses. What the recent tumultuous
event in Venezuela illustrates is how the theatricality or theatrical machinery of represen-
tation has something of the ‘‘religious’’ about it, or at least something that allows a ‘‘pre-
sumption of secrecy’’ in a seemingly ‘‘invisible chamber of power’’ to be suddenly undone
in a ‘‘serialized exposure.’’
Sa ́nchez offers a conceptual matrix that draws on the writings of Lacoue-Labarthe,
Nancy, and Laclau, even though it modifies, that is to say, concretizes and historicizes
PAGE 6363.................16224$ INTR 10-13-06 12:34:24 PS