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NOTES TO PAGES 403–4

Rafael Sa ́nchez, Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Cha ́vez
Regime?

note: Versions of this paper were presented at an ‘‘alternative’’ panel of the American Anthro-
pological Association at Columbia University and in the Departments of Anthropology at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Earlier versions were also given at a
conference entitled Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, and at a conference entitled Political
Theologies in 2001 and at its follow-up in 2004. All these conferences were held at the University
of Amsterdam. It was also the focus of a helpful, lively discussion by the members of the NWO-
sponsored Pionier research program Modern Mass Media, Religion, and the Imagination of Com-
munities, of which I am a part, also at the University of Amsterdam. I would like to thank the
members of these different audiences for their comments. Edmundo Bracho, Victor Bravo, Dio ́-
medes Cordero, Luca diSanto, Marianne Ferme, Charles Hirshkind, Marilyn Ivy, Javier Lasarte,
Fausto Maso ́, Saba Mahmood, Birgit Meyer, Peter Pels, John Pemberton, Jim Siegal, and Paula
Va ́squez read versions of this paper and offered valuable contributions and feedback. I am especially
grateful to Rosalind Carmel Morris for her extensive, highly insightful, and helpful commentary. I
would like to thank Helen Tartar for expert editorial advice. As always, Patricia Spyer has provided
invaluable intellectual companionship at every stage of the writing.

1. Carl Schmitt,The Concept of the Political(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
   1976); Schmitt,Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab
   (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). See Hent de Vries, ‘‘In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres,
   and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,’’ inReligion and Media, ed. Hent de
   Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 23–29, for an illuminating
   discussion of the political-theological significance of miracles and the miraculous, apprehended in
   their relations to the vast field of technicity and special effects.


2. Lisa Trahair, ‘‘The Comedy of Philosophy: Bataille, Hegel, and Derrida,’’Angelaki6, no. 3
   (2001): 155.


3. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Un-knowing Laughter and Tears,’’ trans. Annette Michelson,October 36
   (1986): 102.


4. Simon Critchley,On Humour(London: Routledge, 2002), 1.


5. Trahair, ‘‘The Comedy of Philosophy,’’ 157; Wilhelm S. Wurzer, ‘‘Nancy and the Political
   Imaginary after Nature,’’ inThe Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. Darren Sheppard,
   Simon Sparks, and Colin Thomas (London: Routledge, 1999), 95


6. Pierre Clastres,Society Against the State(New York: Zone Books, 1987).


7. In order to prevent possible misunderstandings, it is, however, important to say that the
   way in which the panties incident affected the local political situation cannot be assimilated to the
   action of some discrete cause from which later events may then be said simply to follow as so many
   equally discrete consequences or effects. Things are more indirect and complicated, even if this does
   not in any way detract from (rather the opposite) the significance that this incident has had for
   later developments in Venezuela. According to my argument, if the panties incident was crucial,
   this is because it was the first time that the limits of the regime’s political theology, the relative
   hollowness of its totalizing claims, became publicly exposed amid explosive laughter. Now, as Ba-
   taille and others have remarked, laughter is contagious—once it starts it is not easily stopped. Since
   that time, whenever in its totalizing claims the regime brushes against its limits, such deflating
   laughter has become customary. It is therefore inconsequential whether the panties incident still
   occupies local people’s imagination. Indeed, for all practical purposes, they may well have forgotten
   it. What is important is that they laugh and, in so doing, somehow repeat the corrosive effects

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