On April 11, 2025, Professor Dr. Daniel Esparza was invited to deliver a guest lecture in Writing the Regime: Literature and Politics, an undergraduate seminar taught by Professor Elaine Wilson at Stony Brook University, New York. Held in Union 111-40, the session explored Catherine Malabou’s essay “The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies” (Representations 127, no. 1), through a provocative lens linking medieval political theology to contemporary ideological movements.
In his lecture, Dr. Esparza drew from Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic concept of the King’s Two Bodies to introduce his original research on what he terms “the religious structure of Chavismo”—the political ideology associated with the leadership style of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro. Arguing that Chavismo mirrors the dynamics of totemism as outlined by Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Dr. Esparza examined the political and symbolic deployment of paternal imagery and constitutional reinvention as key features of this ideological framework.
Through this case study, Dr. Esparza illustrated how Freud’s theories of the délire de toucher and the primal father’s murder offer critical insight into the aesthetic and ritualistic mechanisms sustaining polarizing political movements. His lecture enriched the course’s broader investigation into the relationship between literature, symbolic authority, and state power, and provided students with tools to analyze the political theology underlying modern regimes.