Lope de Aguirre, Hugo Chávez, and the Latin American Left. Alfredo Ignacio Poggi

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СКАЧАТЬ there are different and contradictory interpretations of Lope de Aguirre, are there also common elements or contours among them? The enormous volume of essays and fictional works about Aguirre makes it difficult to answer this question. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the liberating/oppressive and anti-imperial/colonizing dimensions of the conquistador are recurring elements. Starting with the first relaciones and the three letters Aguirre wrote himself, there is a clear uniformity in this central theme: the fight against the empire coincided with the implantation of an oppressive and violent system.

      To recognize the importance of situating reason does not imply abandoning historical sources or textual consistency. An extreme version of situated reason poses the challenge of radical relativism, which dilutes any attempt at historical reconstruction with questions concerning political interests and points of view. In order to navigate between the Scylla of unsituated reason and the Charybdis of an extreme relativism, it is necessary to support interpretations with explicit connections between the researcher, on the one hand, and the object of study⁠—and its many historical source materials⁠—on the other, even as one recognizes the researcher’s particular interests and subjectivity. Historical texts cannot be disengaged from their context and made to speak to a current reality as though they came to us from outside of time and space; this is the temptation of naive historians on both sides of the first of Habermas’s ruptures. As Rolena Adorno states, one is “precisely to avoid divorcing texts from the circumstances that produced them. . . . To be not only theoretically enlightened but also historically responsible is a twin goal worth pursuing.”^[8]

      This book is part of the discipline of cultural studies and does not search for a “truth” behind the texts in the way that a classical nineteenth-century historiography might.^[9] Rather, it tries to illuminate the Latin American social imaginary as it is expressed in appropriations of Aguirre, especially in anti-imperial and liberationist discourses. For this reason, I limit my initial investigation of Aguirre and his rebellion to the liberating/oppressive and anti-imperial/colonizing dimensions. Affirming that these binaries are porous (just as all binaries are) is only the initial step of the analysis. But the richness of the work before us lies in analyzing connections between the poles, asking how one passes from one to the other, and using the historical materials to see how they operate at a discursive and political level in the social imaginary.

      The Linguistic Turn

      Habermas identifies the “linguistic turn” as another twentieth-century intellectual event that broke with Western tradition. Although various thinkers since antiquity have addressed the topic of language, in the mid-twentieth century, language was problematized and became arguably the most relevant topic of investigation in the humanities. The different disciplines⁠—such as philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, psychology, and others⁠—devoted themselves to the study of language no longer as a means of transmitting pure ideas or a hidden reality, but as the constitution of thought itself. Theorists such as Saussure converted the “universal” Kantian categories of human reason, which filter and organize sensory experiences, into linguistic categories that make sense only in their interrelationships with each other within the same language system. Habermas describes this shift as a transition from a philosophy of consciousness to one of language.^[10]

      From this starting point, Saussure constructed a theory for the analysis of a universal human structure based on language; many prestigious intellectuals, such as Levi-Strauss, followed him in this task.^[11] However, with their work, the structuralists also undermined one of the most solid foundations of the modern project, pure consciousness, and hence prepared the way for deconstruction. The poststructuralists realized that these linguistic structures were artificial, finite, and relative creations and that they pervaded all dimensions of human thought and life, from economic, political, and cultural structures to psychological and biological ones.

      The study of reality thus became a textual analysis, interpreting relationships of meaning as they emerged in diverse articulations of reality and doing so with varying degrees of power at all social levels. Power, here, is understood not only as the might of governments but as belonging, too, to any conception of the world that can marginalize some social groups and legitimize others. Of course, this theoretical proposal is not uniformly accepted and has generated extensive debate. Nevertheless, literary and cultural studies gained an impressive distinction among the humanities, since the analysis of texts was transformed from a merely aesthetic matter into a critical component of social thought. One of the most fruitful intellectual results of this movement has been postcolonial theory.

      Although empires have been present since the beginning of human history, the originality of postcolonial studies that emerged in the 1980s consists in the fact that they work at a discursive level. For a postcolonial thinker, colonialism and imperialism do not come to an end once political independence has been attained, but permeate our conceptions of the world and maintain a concrete influence on daily decisions and relationships. In fact, in the 1980s, direct political imperialisms were actually in decline, and the majority of the Asian and African colonies had achieved their independence; yet it would be false to say that colonial and imperialist mindsets have not persisted in all involved cultures, even today.

      Edward Said describes this change of perspective in the following way:

      Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and peoples require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination.^[12]

      For postcolonial studies, and following post-structuralist proposals, Eurocentric and imperialist conceptions can be located in historical texts. These studies reveal how the idea of the superiority of the white European over the primitive and exotic non-Western person survives in contemporary culture with its powerful discursive mechanisms, and it has its genesis in the modern civilizational and imperialist project.

      If it were possible to determine a point of departure for the postcolonial approach, it would be the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism in 1978. Said uses the discursive analytical method of Michel Foucault to unveil in historical texts the presence of orientalism, that is, Western concepts and practices about the Middle East and non-European people in general. For Said, the texts associated with orientalism “can create not only knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe.”^[13] In those exotic and primitive descriptions of the Middle East by Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a new reality defined by uneven relationships of power took shape. Said shares most post-structuralists’ belief that it is impossible to escape this textual reality: “It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing as a real or true Orient ( . . . ) On the contrary, I have been arguing that ‘the Orient’ is itself a constituted entity.”^[14]

      Scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha^[15] joined their work to Said’s postcolonial analysis, revealing the imperialist discourses that impregnated people’s conceptions of the world not only in colonizing Europe but also in the colonized societies themselves. Several prestigious Latin American thinkers also participated in the postcolonial debate, although they had, in fact, essentially been doing so since the 1960s and 70s, in the form of Marxist and world-system theoretical analysis. One of the most recognized and influential of these thinkers is Enrique Dussel, who uses the categories of Karl Marx and Emanuel Levinas to unveil the history of exploitation in Latin America by European empires and the permanence of colonialism today.

      One of Dussel’s chief contributions to the postcolonial debate is the assertion that modernity arose in 1492 with the “discovery” of the Americas and the displacement of Europe to the center of the world.^[16] While arbitrarily identifying a “beginning” of modernity⁠—in the rise of nominalism, in the Reformation, in the printing press, in the Renaissance, СКАЧАТЬ