Читать книгу Lope de Aguirre, Hugo Chávez, and the Latin American Left - Alfredo Ignacio Poggi - Страница 11

While in most cases one reacts angrily to a real and concrete assault, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of imagination in the experience of this emotion. Jan Plamper explains, “The power of imagination is also an element of anger: revenge is sweet, and the sweetness of revenge is something imagined; here, expectation blossoms in the domain of imagination.”^[39] Meanwhile, anti-imperialism itself clearly has much to do with the imagination, as well. In 2015, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) published a cultural study titled The Anti-imperialist Imagination in Latin America, which examined, among others, such books as Ariel and The Open Veins of Latin America; such political figures such as Sandino and Chávez; and various depictions of revolution in the visual arts and cinema. For the authors of these individual essays, anti-imperialism in Latin America is not a single doctrinal body or ideological system, but a social imaginary that widely permeates the continent’s varied cultural and political expressions of thought.^[40]

Since Cornelius Castoriadis popularized the concept of the social imaginary, different definitions have been assigned to it, some mutually exclusive. The one most suitable for our work is Charles Taylor’s. Taking emblematic works such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as a point of reference, Taylor writes:

By social imaginary . . . I am thinking . . . of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underline these expectations . . . ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends. . . . The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.^[41]

The anti-imperialist social imaginary is both foundational and omnipresent in the history of Latin America. The idea of Latin American unity has taken hold even on a continent of almost irreconcilable cultural diversity whenever the specter of an external, imperialist threat has appeared. This suggests that anti-imperialism could represent the primordial experience of what Latin America is, seeking its uniqueness in the face of such menacing Western assailants as modernity, capitalism, and so on.

What The Anti-imperialist Imagination does not contemplate or address is the connection that exists in the social imaginary between this anti-imperialist dimension and anger. The pain of imperial exploitation and genocide on the Latin American continent⁠—repeated at different historical moments and at the hands of different empires⁠—has engendered the desire (lived out through political rhetoric that appeals to the imagination) not only for independence but also for the pleasure of revenge. In that sense, the anti-imperial dimension shares the same characteristics of anger: both the pain of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the colonial wound,^[42] and the pleasure of a revenge exacted through rebellion.

Lope de Aguirre also operates in the field of this social imaginary⁠—not only for the writers of colonial texts but also for those who would invoke his memory later⁠—even to the point of becoming an archetype. Abel Posse, in his novel Daimon, elaborates a narrative in which Aguirre reincarnates again and again, up to the present day, in Latin America. Posse thus examines the direct and indirect echoes of the marañón rebellion on the continent.

While it is necessary to take into account the significant differences in context and political particularities of the various anti-imperial projects, it is no less important to note their similarities. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the double dimension of the liberating/oppressive kingdom of Aguirre that covered Margarita Island and a large part of Venezuela could be associated with that of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution. This is just one instance in an endless list of political regimes and processes, both on the left and on the right, that reclaimed national sovereignty from imperial powers and answered the liberationist demands of their exploited people, while at the same time containing tyrannical and oppressive elements⁠—in their rhetoric, if nowhere else. One thinks here of Henri Christophe, Porfirio Díaz, Fidel Castro, Leopoldo Galtieri, and many others.

This book does not propose to draw up a list of similarities and differences among the continent’s many anti-imperial movements⁠—a task that would be at once arduous, contentious, and still simplistic⁠—but to focus on the figure of Aguirre, suggesting possible connections with other historical contexts yet leaving any actual analysis to the reader. That said, this work has not only an analytical objective but also a practical one. For Aristotle, anger, like other emotions, can be educated, and a well-formed imagination plays a determining role.^[43] Demonstrating the mechanisms of the Latin American anti-imperial social imaginary can serve as a basis for developing programs that can re-educate us about them and warn of their dangers.

Those who reject the possibility of educating the emotions and cleave instead to a theory of biological determinism may stake their positions on an anecdote told by Charles Darwin. The story goes that one day, Darwin saw a snake in a cage at a zoo and recoiled instinctively, even though he knew that there was a glass between him and the animal and that he could not be bitten. The lesson seems clear: his fear was activated, and his body reacted. For Darwin and the biological determinists, emotions are present since birth in our natural constitution and simply await activation by external stimuli.

Jan Plamper imagines an Aristotelian response. For Plamper, following Aristotle, even emotions that seem instinctual are the product of social learning.

Aristotle would have traced my fear of the snake I saw in the woods to the imagined harm I suffered from the threat of its bite, but ascribed to me the capacity of suppressing any preprogrammed emotion before it started because I had, as a 6-year-old visiting the terrarium in the Boston Zoo, developed a real love of snakes, or stopping it because as a 40-year-old I had engaged in behavioral therapy that kept my phobia in check.^[44]

Much of the Western intellectual tradition follows Aristotle in its belief in the possibility of shaping emotions, especially in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Moreover, several schools of psychology take this point to heart and work with their patients through imaginative exercises. Anger management therapies, for instance, with their variety of cognitive-behavioral methods, are popular today.

Unveiling the wrathful constitution of the first modern anti-imperial project can reveal a working map of the dangers and opportunities of such enterprises in the future. According to Habermas, philosophy⁠—and the humanities in general⁠—were impregnated in the nineteenth century with the idea of praxis, to the point that it took precedence over theory.^[45] Marx’s motto that we study the world precisely in order to change it has become increasingly relevant in all disciplines and ideological camps. This clarifies the meaning of the fourth great rupture proposed by Habermas: the break from logocentrism, from the centrality of the word and of symbolic order. The primacy of theory over actual practice has, in modernity, been reversed.

In conclusion, how might we approach Lope de Aguirre and the marañón rebellion considering these four ruptures? The first step, extending through the next two chapters, will be to analyze the available historical sources⁠—ten relaciones, four chronicles, the three letters of Lope de Aguirre, the declaration of independence, and notes from the marañones’ trials⁠—within this clarified framework of the European imposition of a new, “Modern Moral Order,” and the corresponding reaction of anti-imperial wrath. Chapters 4 and 5 will then present a serious challenge: how can we analyze the permanence of (and variations in) the anti-imperialist social imaginary without falling into a methodological chaos? Which adaptations of Aguirre will we select from among the many?

Admittedly, the choice will be somewhat arbitrary, as many methodological decisions are, yet it will still retain a basic logic. I will analyze only those historical works and fictional adaptations that rehabilitated the figure of Aguirre as a positive character. One of the contributions of this work will be to show how, for three centuries, the figure of Aguirre was condemned by all writers, historians, and artists of different ideologies and political tendencies. However, in the late nineteenth century and with the rise of Latin American anti-imperialism against the United States, Aguirre’s reputation was salvaged and he was re-imagined as a precursor of continental liberation. Moreover, during the twentieth century, the figure of Aguirre moved progressively toward the ideologies of the left, and it has been socialist and communist thinkers who have defended him most vehemently from criticism. In this sense, the Latin American leftist movements not only appropriated anti-imperialism during the twentieth century but also defended Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

Finally, in the last two chapters, the connection between Aguirre and the consolidation of liberation movements and theory⁠—especially as they reached their apogee in the 1960s and 70s⁠—will allow us to study and unveil the component of anger and the exclusion of mercy in the Latin American anti-imperialist imaginary, which still has an impact on current political events. With our initial theoretical map of Aguirre’s expedition in hand, we now set off into the heart of the marañones’ anti-imperialist jungle and encounter the primary sources that will support, contradict, or enrich our investigation.