Chatarra espiritual / Mario Di Giacomo

Spiritual Scrap Heap

In the name of the crisis of Western reason and its historical products, postmodern versions of thought hurl us toward the theoretical black hole from which a possible horizon of coexistence, different and superior to that accorded by the Enlightenment project, cannot be glimpsed. What is curious about the pomo episteme, wrapped in its mantle of intangible weakness, is that it ends up coinciding with the Venezuelan project devastated by the delirious logic of absolute power. Professor [Eduardo] Vásquez has a point when he adduces that one needs an infinite amount of pity to execute a reading of [Rigoberto] Lanz, along with an infinite stomach to listen to his brother, another one of the regime's ideologists. The crisis of Enlightenment reason should be tackled for the sake of reason itself, so as to allow precisely everything that had been separated from other ways of life to enter within its sphere. But it ends up being curious, once again, that what has been brought to the surface by the fascist Venezuelan project, whose proclamations belong to the extreme left and whose practices belong to the extreme right, runs down the slope of a logic bound to a single discourse that, by natural consequence, evacuates all possibilities for dissent.

[Gianni] Vattimo, faithful to the subject's weakness, in this way being in accordance with the ontological weakening of the real and the loss of God, does not seem to have noticed his own agreement with the hardness of the single discourse he praises today. The Enlightenment is critiqued for its exclusionary model of rationality, and yet it is not understood that the desired inclusion of a multiplicity of voices is given no room within the space of ascription to Venezuelan tropical fascism. Thus it would seem that the lost faith of certain characters returns to their codes, but under an almost absolute perversion they dare not recognize. Vattimo's polite pietas is wedded to a totalitarian process. The perversion remains branded by the countless events that don't multiply the possibility for discordant voices to settle in public spaces, but instead, on the contrary, are its negation. A negation that goes beyond the sectarian processes provoked by the Luis Tascón web site, the privation of government jobs, the corralling of dissidence and the spying on neighbors: a negation to the very death (remember here the dead of 4-11-2002) of those who defy the logic of absolute power of a project that has done nothing but deceive on all sides, since in its psychic depths, in its spiritual scrap heap, it shelters a desire for religious truth, a Great Discourse, that nourishes itself from its own self (a fundamentalism that binds us to the radicals of the Middle East).

In this way then, the postmodern propensity toward the multiplication of world visions, mediating the critique of Enlightenment thought, the fashionable European scream, ends up pontificating in favor of a neo-fascist Third World leader. Strange luck that of the reason which in reproaching exclusions ends up in the greatest of exclusions. And it is simply that even though they might act in good faith, there are bastards of all kinds: critiquing the Enlightenment illusion of the control of power through autonomous constitutional divisions, they end up handing over absolute power to a monarch or tyrant, transforming the institutional regime into a pure and simple cosmetic.




{ Mario Di Giacomo, TalCual, 22 September 2006 }