NOTES TO PAGES 414–16- Ibid., 139–258.
- Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher
Fynsk, introd. Jacques Derrida (1989; rpt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 138. - Jean-Luc Nancy,Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven
Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3. - As I argue in my dissertation, the frequent insistence, in Venezuelan and Latin American
constitutionalism, on regarding a new nation’s constitutional texts as tools for molding the nation
or bringing it into being must be understood in light of these highly troubled circumstances. The
need to mold or give shape arose so urgently precisely because, with the demise of the empire,
things had so thoroughly imploded. The claim, commonly found in the literature, that because of
their highly abstract, formal character these ‘‘modern’’ texts are radically at odds with their presum-
ably ‘‘traditional’’ contexts and thus have little or no formative efficacy there is fundamentally
misguided. Rather, it is largely on account of their very abstractness that these foundational texts
can shape or intervene in the very modern circumstances in which they continuously emerge. It is,
in other words, due to this very abstractness that they are at all capable of somehow meeting the
(demiurgic) challenge that, since Independence from Spain, these modern circumstances continue
to pose. See my ‘‘Dancing Jacobins,’’ 3–32, 287–358. - Ibid., 139–258.
- Jean-Franc ̧ois Lyotard,Des dispositifs pulsionnels(Paris: Union Ge ́ne ́rale d’Editions, 1973),
180–81. - For the relevance of a theatrical paradigm of representation for understanding the Venezu-
elan situation after Independence from Spain, see my ‘‘Dancing Jacobins,’’ 236–58. - Ibid., 259–313.
- I am grateful to Rosalind Morris for pointing out that the crowd/audience opposition can
be fruitfully addressed by analyzing the different ‘‘positions and relations’’ that these two different
social modalities maintain vis-a`-vis ‘‘speakers,’’ here the tribunes of the republic. According to
Morris, ‘‘whereas an audience is interpellated, no such ‘‘dyadic’’ relationship obtains for a crowd.
As a result, where an audience listens, a crowd is ‘‘distracted’’ and ‘‘diffuse.’’ While I fully agree
with Morris, I cannot here go into the complex issues and circumstances that, in Venezuela, account
for something so consequential for the nation’s republican history as a breakdown of the speaker/
audience relation. Such a breakdown, indeed, accounts for the (re-)emergence of crowds as a di-
mension endemic to this history. InDancing Jacobins, I do, however, address that issue in terms of
the emergence, conditions of possibility, and existential limits of a theatrical paradigm that was first
installed in Venezuela as a response to the crisis of Independence from Spain. - Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy,Retreating the Political, 122–34.
- Michel Foucault,‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975–1976
(New York: Picador, 2003), 239–63. - Marshall Sahlins, in ‘‘The Strange King or, Dume ́zil Among the Fijians,’’ has argued that
throughout the world the notion of the king as ‘‘stranger’’ or foreigner amounts to an ontology of
the political in which state power is necessarily extrinsic to and in excess of society, an alien element
that needs to be domesticated (Marshall Sahlins,Islands of History[Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985], 73–103). See also Bonnie Honig,Democracy and the Foreigner(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 7, 20–22, for the pervasiveness of the ‘‘classic foreigner founder script’’ as
a means of ‘‘managing some paradoxes of democratic founding, such as the alienness of the law.’’
(ibid., 7). I leave for another occasion reflecting on whether such a script is relevant only to ‘‘demo-
cratic founding’’ or whether, as Sahlins suggests, it applies to all sorts of founding, given the irreduc-
ibly democratic element that he discerns in ‘‘society’’ once, for analytic purposes, the state is
abstracted.
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