The Postmodern Philosopher and the Human Vultures
Realism does not overcome the acts of experience, even though they might seem miserable to it. It does not subvert them, and thus it binds the imagination, it cuts its wings and prevents it from looking higher and further than a sad eye. Maybe because of this, in 1929 André Breton enunciates a decisive definition of surrealism: "Everything induces the belief that a certain point exists within the human spirit from which life and death, the real and the imagined...are no longer seen as contradictions."
Reality does not have to reject imagination's embrace. No one ignores that in Venezuela there exists a "parallel public order" to which, sadly, the philospher Gianni Vattimo appeals so as to confess that he is "fanatically Chavista" (sic); that order has enjoyed and enjoys a deluge of petrodollars. Vattimo's prattling makes him say: "Money is fundamental.
When I've gone to Cuba I've even said to Fidel Castro: 'The Cuban revolution finally transformed itelf into something serious with Venezuela's money.' To which Fidel answers: 'We remain independent.'
'Agreed,' I tell him, 'but in the end, Cuba is a poor island' " (El Nacional, 7/16/06). In other words cursed capitalist money made Cuba serious.
Moreover the delicious Vattimo seems to have a hidden weak thought. He doesn't know the country and he secures his fanaticism in the missions created by Chávez and Castro. When he confesses to being a Chavista he is declaring himself the follower of a caudillo and not of an ideology.
What misery, this philosopher who does the same thing crazy Luz Caraballo's daughters did: running off with a man on horseback! This philosopher thinks but does not exist as such, because he sustains that development, whether capitalist or socialist, will end up asphyxiating us. Will he say the same thing to the tattered Albanian, Bosnian and Serbian adolescents who beg for money in northern Italy? This glamorous philosopher asserts that "utopias seek the future but arrive from the past," and he comments: "In that word (revolution) there is this sense of recuperating what happened many years ago, and which gives it its character." Might he mean to say that he does not see us transforming ourselves "from the noble savage to the noble revolutionary,"* but rather the opposite: that we cease being revolutionaries so as to return to noble savagery? That is why he insists: "The novelty of Christian life—conversion—has to be a reconversion before the original past."
A return to nakedness and prohibited sexuality? Forgetting Breton, the postmodern Vattimo does not see the misery living alongside the opulent State. For example, he ignores that 149 people live off the trash at the dump in the city of Maturín. Ernestina Herrera informs us (El Nacional, 7/18/06) that pregnant women and children scavenge through the waste; she inserts brief references to three people. I will summarize one of them: Nicolasa Regalado arrived in 2001 and became part of the group, which they themselves call "human vultures," impelled by the unbearable misery of her home.
It is bothersome that Vattimo, who knows very well what fascism was, is now a fanatic of an antidemocratic megalomaniac.
* Translator's note: A reference to Carlos Rangel, Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976)
{ Héctor Silva Michelena, TalCual, 14 August 2006 }
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