Lenguaje indirecto / Oswaldo Barreto

Indirect Language

Anyone who has listened to the speech Chávez delivered to commemorate the Battle of Carabobo or has read the version of it that’s been circulating throughout the world by means of the Efe news agency, will have noticed two facts that characterize it. The first is that this oratorical piece condenses the same preoccupations, the same themes that always seem to be present in the thought of its author, for a long time now. The second thing is that this condensation of president Chávez's principal themes is presented under the form of opaque expressions or ones that carry different, even opposing meanings.

On the one hand, the obsessive presence of Fidel Castro and his "revolutionary" process: “Fidel Castro has told me that if I die this revolution will vanish with the wind (...) He's told me this many times and I still resist accepting it, but when I think and see the realities around me I realized that sadly Fidel Castro, once more, is right (...) because we still haven't been able to build a single party.”

On the other hand, the equally obsessive desire of mimicking (not just mimicking, but imitating, aping and copying every last detail) each and every one of the vicissitudes Fidel Castro's “revolution” has known. To live through the terror of war, above all: “We are strengthening Venezuela’s military power not to attack anyone but to avoid, precisely, imperial lunacies and to assure peace for ourselves.” A desire to exorcise the fascinating presence of that specter in the same manner: “They try to infer in our relations with Russia, which are profound and strategic, because what we’re going to speak about there (in the encounter that began today) has to do with the sovereignty, defense and integrity of our homeland.” And, at the risk of contradicting his own affirmation that he’s done very little to ensure the masses will follow him in this desire, an exposition of the decisive force he counts on to defeat the specter: “We don’t need the atomic bomb because we already have it, and it is the revolutionary masses of Venezuela, who have the force of 100 atomic bombs..”

Masks and contradictions, if we take these texts as expressions of his thought in the common language of mortals. But there are other languages, such as the indirect language in which mimetic creations tend to express themselves along with the over-determinations that arise from the unconscious. We’ll look into this further here in Pórtico.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 27 June 2007 }