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Seized by the Spirit 237

Mystical Foundations

This, then, is the kind of reality to which in recent years both the Holy
Ghost and Chávez have arrived; ever since these two related arrivals
occurred, it has definitely been show time in Venezuela. Leaving aside for
the moment both the media and Chávez, what I wish to underscore here is
that it is from the very depths of the squatters’ dispossession that the most
extreme form of possession, that is, by God Almighty himself, is insistently
called forth. As the Pentecostal squatters put it while not always convinc-
ingly insisting in their total fearlessness amidst their utter vulnerability, it
is all a matter of “standing firm on the rock of Christ” allowing Him
amidst all of the world’s sinfulness and fears to do battle for oneself. Such
a dramatic turnaround brings to mind Racine’s play Athalie, where the
character Abner exchanges the dangers and fears of this world for “fear of
God” as that “supplemental fear” that is “more frightening than all earthly
fear.” According to Slavoj Žižek, in Lacan’s understanding such an
exchange retroactively renders these “fears into a perfect courage” while
turning Abner from an “unreliable zealot” into “a firm, faithful adherent
sure of himself and of divine power” (1991, 16–17).
What Lacan says about Abner may also be said about the Pentecostal
squatters who, by standing firm on Christ’s unmovable rock, land on the
very “mystical foundation of authority.” As analyzed by Derrida, it is on
such grounding that every higher authority rests as an originary “violence,”
a “mystical foundation” that cannot be legitimized. This is just to say that
lawlessness lies at the very source of the law as a violent, ineffable origin
that, while inaugurating the law, nevertheless exceeds both the law and the
logos itself. (Derrida 2002, 228–298). Silently trapped inside the law, it is
such an unaccountable, embarrassing excess that nonetheless enables the
law to be the law or legislate the world’s manifold, hybrid realities, the
myriad disappropriations of the proper, as so many seemingly self- possessed,
self-identical entities, an outcome to which violence, of one or another sort
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and of a greater or lesser degree, is by no means irrelevant. Given the
depth of the Pentecostal squatters’ disappropriation, it is not surprising if it

is not just violence but its highest form, Divine Violence, which they enlist
in their attempt to repossess the world in the name and on behalf of the
Holy Ghost.
Even if their circumstances may seem dramatically different, the squat-
ters nevertheless live in the same fallen world as we do. Much as in any
other, in such a world “the religious” names the ineradicable trace of ideal-
ity and transcendence that, always in excess of the world, must neverthe-
less intervene in the world if some enduring experiences and entities are,