Page 253 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

238 Rafael Sánchez

through repetition, to be temporarily wrested away from this world’s many
losses and disappearances. While the violence of such a religious force may
be more or less, amounting as it does to the sovereignty of the Holy Ghost
seizing or repossessing through them the fallen world that has become
stranded from the Godhead, the religious force that takes hold of the
squatters’ minds and bodies could not be more excessive and violent. In its
excessiveness, such a force is minimally equal to the squatter’s equally
excessive, radical disappropriation.
It is not just, then, that as a result of such a possession the squatters are
seized by the Spirit; through them, such a Spirit literally seizes everything
on which these squatters have either put their hands or fantasize so doing,
from buildings and shoe factories to beer pubs, restaurants, abandoned
hotels, shops for electric and electronic appliances, and so on, in a list that
is potentially infinite. Even if I might have suggested otherwise it is not,
however, as if a recalcitrant world no longer posed any limits to the Holy
Spirit’s repossessing designs so that, availed of this Ghost’s founding power
and authority, the squatters were free to possess whatever they wished
without any worldly obstacles ever crossing their path. If that were so, the
Pentecostal squatters would be some kind of superpower irrepressibly swal-
lowing all of reality, which clearly they are not. In their repossessing spatial
practices the squatters constantly brush against the law. This is just to say,
first, that no matter how weakened, the Venezuelan state still has some
coercive powers of its own, and, second, that regardless of their ambitions,
as God’s chosen people the squatters have yet to step out of the desert like
some self-sufficient, sovereign power; far from such a Leviathan-like con-
dition, as exposed and vulnerable as ever, they rather insist on their harsh
circumstances, ignorant for the most part of what such a Promised Land
would be like.

Ghostly Possessions

If there were any doubts about the squatters’ vulnerability, these were dis-

pelled in the wake of the murders when, sweeping through all the apart-
ments, police forces temporarily evicted them from the building while
stealing all of their possessions, from TVs, radios, and VCRs to refrigera-
tors, beds, and other household appliances. When a few days later the
squatters were officially authorized to reenter their apartments, they
returned to empty floors and walls, stripped bare of what was there before
an experience that, dramatically so, made once again explicit the very dis-
possession that, in their inability to hold to anything for too long, is