Page 256 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Seized by the Spirit 241

internal enemies, the Catholic Church. But beyond this contingent polit-
ical motivation, such a public explosion of viscerality is, I believe, closely
related to similar instances where President Chávez and members of his
government have introduced into public discourse references and expres-
sions that hitherto had been rigorously confined to the realm of the pri-
vate. Such “intimate publicities,” as I call them elsewhere, have become
routine in Venezuela (Sánchez 2006, 401–426). One could cite a number
of these nefarious, homophobic, or misogynous instances, rich with
exposed viscerality, such as statements by President Chávez on national
television joking about sodomizing his enemies in the upcoming general
elections. One, however, stands out: the words by one government offi-
cial on a television program who, asked to comment on a female politi-
cian who at the time Chávez had just named his vice president, answered
by jokingly cautioning his audience about never trusting “an animal that
bleeds monthly and does not die” (El Nacional, 11 October 2000).
One does not begin to grasp these instances in their significance as pub-
lic explosions of viscerality, bodiliness, and, generally, the hidden and the
intimate unless one takes stock of the breakdown of representation and the
representative relation as it, for example, takes place in the Pentecostal ser-
vice that I have alluded to before. As I argue elsewhere in reference to
Venezuela, a sealed bourgeois sphere of political representation gathered
around specularity and the eye and protected by protocol and secrecy was
erected in both Europe and North, Central, and South America in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century as an inherently violent means to
defuse the violence and terror of the revolutionary wars then raging on
both sides of the Atlantic (Sánchez 2004).
Fuelled by universal skepticism and subjected to the kind of “media’s
haste” of which Sylviane Agacinski speaks in the epigraph to this chapter,
the current withdrawal of such a separate, relatively self-contained sphere
of political representation, no longer protected by secrecy, signals the
blurring of the demarcation between “private” and “public” domains, a
return of bodiliness, viscerality, and the senses to center stage and, along
with these, the generalization of violence that now colors all of sociality.
Drawn into a globalized avalanche of digitally and electronically repro-

duced images and texts, with their penchant for obliterating any temporal
gap or delay between events and their “live” presentation to the public,
such a bourgeois sphere begins to give in, no longer is allowed the “tem-
porizing” that, again according to Agacinski, is needed in order “to
develop proposals, to discuss the possible outcomes, to persuade, to imple-
ment decisions” within a domain that is somewhat protected from the
urgent demands, pressures, and instigations of the public (Agacinski
2003, 139).