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HENT DE VRIES

their premises. In the theatricality, as well as in the structure of ‘‘monumental govern-
mentality,’’ that inspires the nationalist and populist imagination to aim at ‘‘healing the
nation’s fractures by once again uniting the nation in an inclusive totality’’ via appeal to
its founding father, the ‘‘Rousseauean Great Legislator and People’s Delegate,’’ Simo ́n
Bolı ́var, Sa ́nchez discerns the characteristics of the theologico-political, in the precise
sense that Schmitt and then Kantorowicz have given to this term (p. 413).
In particular, he invites us to raise the question of whether this link between the
religious and the political or theologico-political is structural or accidental, that is to say,
revelatory of a general law—or ontology—of the political or explainable in terms of the
historical effect of ‘‘the Spanish King’s awesome disappearance some two hundred years
ago and the catastrophic consequences that followed. Among these were the collapse of
the entire colonial order, with its articulated orders and estates, now bereft of the kingly
‘thing’ that had glued it together.’’ What follows is an avalanche of repetitions and re-
enactments, each outstripping its predecessor, a ‘‘lateral mimetic flight’’ in which ‘‘the
new subalterns sought to fill the postcolonial spaces now made vacant and flattened,’’ to
which one tribune after the next (Cha ́vez being only the last in a long series) sought to
put a halt by ‘‘arresting through reflection’’ this movement of flight and by staging a
radical and fundamentally Jacobin constitutionalism, in which the law would mirror the
general will of the people (p. 414). But then, following a more fundamental logic, which
dictates the ultimate irreconcilability of the universal (the law) and the particular (the
audiences that make up the people), Latin America’s tribunes do inevitably lose their
constituencies and hence legitimacy. For all their ‘‘hyperbolic frenzy,’’ they remain be-
hind, ‘‘gesticulating in an empty theater,’’ signaling once more the ‘‘retreat’’ of the politi-
cal—here, the theologico-political—in that the ‘‘withdrawal of any communal figure of
identification’’ becomes increasingly palpable the more it is fantasized in one hyperbolic
invocation after another (e.g., in the moves and countermoves of the regime and its
opposition). Its only answer would seem to be yet another—and, Sa ́nchez leaves no
doubt, ultimately vain—appeal to a ‘‘power from the outside,’’ to the ‘‘reservoir of tran-
scendence’’ for which Bolı ́var is the proper name and stand-in, conjuring up the ‘‘vertical
prosthesis’’ of a general will that is all too inclined to disperse itself into a ‘‘horizontal
transcendence’’ of ‘‘tribunal prosthesis’’ and its myriad singular cases. Insight into this
logic, rather than into that of, say, bio-politics, offers us a key to understanding what
happens to the political, at least on this continent (p. 416).
The more force is invoked, the less presence it has. What is intriguing in Sa ́nchez’s
analysis of the internal logic of the ‘‘politics of exemplarity’’ and the ‘‘aporetic nature of
the ‘general will’ ’’ (p. 415) is that no ontico-empirical origin or end of the series of
iterations that punctuate political history seems presupposed, conjured up, or called for,
not even as a transcendental illusion of sorts. The reference to singularity, representation,
and incarnation should be seen instead as a fall into conflicted, fragmenting interests and
desires, which are portrayed as necessarily at odds with the unified, totalizing, vertical

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