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Seized by the Spirit 243

One can learn something about how, and with what effects, such an
uncanny mix of viscerality and religious violence happens by briefly focus-
ing on what goes on during possession among the Pentecostal squatters.
Much as in television with which such a spectral being is so conspicuously
entangled, when the Holy Ghost seizes the body of one or another squatter,
He arrives “live,” something that is evident from the profuse tears, singing,
frothing, praising, shaking, and dancing that his invisible yet overwhelm-
ing presence sensuously draws from the believers. Coursing through what
remains of the institutional assemblage, now hardly capable of represent-
ing or mediating the numinous, in His crusade to repossess the world such
a living God places the body and bodiliness at the crossroads of a thunder-
ous clash of forces on a mobile terrain where all territorial and social
boundaries constantly shift. Bereft of all mediating institutional protec-
tions, in all of its vulnerability such a tremulous body is, in other words,
increasingly delivered to a battle against demons. This, by the way, is one
possible meaning of the return of bodiliness, not only to our academic
attention but to the center of sociality, as well.
As the character of electoral campaigns all over the world increasingly
shows, with most markers of distinction between the “public” and the “pri-
vate” blurred, much of collective life increasingly looks like such a bodily
spiritual battle. One good example is the poisonous campaign ads and right-
wing blogs in the United States with their unmediated appeal to and expo-
sure of a series of “lowly” bodily passions; another is the latest elections in
Venezuela, troped by Chávez as a battle of the people against an opposition
cast as the devil: posters figuring a wholesome people’s representative over-
whelming a squeamish, stereotypically homosexual devil starkly made the
point that, more and more, with the theologico-political retreating, politics
is all a matter of filling one’s mouth with ugly, filthy words so as to momen-
tarily recollect one’s dispersed forces to, yet again, go and demolish the
enemy. The extreme polarization and extraordinarily close results of many
elections around the world are, I believe, sure symptoms of such a wide-
spread reduction of sociality to mortal bodily combat. Whether from the left
or from the right, if something good is ever to come out from such an unset-
tling state of affairs, so redolent with viscerality, I simply do not know.

Notes

This is a reduced version of an essay published in Public Culture 20, no. 2 (2008).
The research on which this chapter is based was carried out while I was a postdoc-
toral fellow in the research program on which this volume is based. Earlier versions