A Review of The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

by Isabel Piniella Grillet | Aug 30, 2025

Death does not always mean an end. In early 2013, Venezuela’s president, known as Comandante Hugo Chávez, died after struggling with cancer. Having won the 2012 presidential elections—and perhaps anticipating the imminent end of his life before taking office—he proclaimed Vice President Nicolás Maduro as his political successor and publicly urged supporters to vote for him should the electoral process need to be repeated. Maduro’s presidential campaign was thus emotionally charged, with grief instrumentalized to establish a kind of revolutionary dynasty. Chávez’s death was indeed a turning point, yet the spirituality built around the Bolivarian Revolution both precedes and outlives him.

The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution by Irina R. Troconis (Duke University Press, 2025)

Over the course of my summer break, I immersed myself in Irina Troconis’ The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. The title alone drew my attention, given my engagement with memory studies and cultural analysis, particularly around civic cults and national myths in Latin America within revolutionary frameworks. While much scholarly energy has understandably focused on dismantling right-wing populism, Troconis’ work invites a critical reexamination of leftist political affective structures that, as in the Venezuelan case, linger and pervade, resulting in a state of political irresolution.

Rather than dwelling solely on devastation, she seeks to open space for hope and change. For those of us marked by the disappointments of progressive projects, it feels essential to question discourses grounded in historical inevitability, destiny or emotional excess. Trained in the traditions of new historicism and cultural critique, I’m quite attentive to how historiography itself comes into being, and to the unease provoked by teleological narratives, which, as Troconis persuasively argues, end up hijacking our political imagination at a moment when radical creativity is most needed. In this sense, her book brilliantly points us toward a necessary debate: one that not only scrutinizes past failures but also works to recover a sense of futurity.

For readers interested in recent Venezuelan affairs, and even more for those engaged with post-national debates, ethnographic approaches to mnemonic practices and affective engagements in cultural production, The Necromantic State offers an interdisciplinary account of state and popular excess. It traces how uncommon media are mobilized to keep alive those who are already dead. This co-participation between the state and the public is key to understanding the scope of the operations Troconis analyzes. The state provides the frame or, to borrow sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, it is the habitat in which inhabitants develop their habitus. Yet this book is not about officialdom, its intentions or its achievements. As Troconis repeatedly insists (and I paraphrase): it is not about civic cults, but h(a)unting; not about heroes, but specters; not about continuation, but afterglow; not about memory, but afterlife; not about commemoration, but animation. This wording is not merely a rhetorical device, but rather a methodological orientation.

Troconis draws on an abundant body of Venezuelan scholarship, and her text demonstrates her familiarity with key studies on Simón Bolívar’s cult, Venezuelan governmentality, the nationness of the Bolivarian Revolution, and recent literature that depicts the deterioration and ruins caused by its multidimensional crisis. Her study engages in strong dialogue with anthropological works such as Fernando Coronil’s The Magical State, Rafael Sánchez’s Dancing Jacobins and Michael Taussig’s The Magic of the State. Inspired by ethnographic accounts, her study takes the form of an exploration that stems from her visit to Caracas and Mérida in 2016, leading her to humbly state that it is not a systematic approach and that the case studies she discusses arise from her wandering experience, which is palpable also in her writing, at times taking the form of diary entries or inserting “interludes” between chapters. In this sense, she foregrounds her own vulnerability as a researcher, acknowledging that her “ghost hunting” also becomes a “ghost haunting,” since she too is haunted by the object of her gaze, which looks back at her.

However, crucial to understanding her focus is the way she constructs her theoretical corpus primarily from Anglo-American scholarship, drawing on works such as Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains, J.T. Mitchell’s What do pictures want?, Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism, James Elkins’ The Object Stares Back, or Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects. To sustain her critique of the hijacking of political creativity, she draws on Chiara Bottici’s philosophical work Imaginal Bodies and how imagination is regulated by complex dealings of visual culture that operate as visual chains, ultimately causing the “hypertrophy of the imaginal” in Bottici’s words. In her final section, she reflects on the need to shift our mode of thinking from “afterlife” to “afterdeath” to overcome imaginal stagnation. This is a call to bury Chávez and even Bolívar —not to erase them, but to make them men again and allow their spirits to fade.

This concluding call stands as one of the book’s most striking arguments and emerges from what I see as one of its greatest achievements: a reversal of Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters. Rather than merely extending Gordon’s insights, Troconis flips the perspective, completing the picture while leaving us with an unsettling open question: How do we distinguish between good and evil specters? Is such a differentiation possible at all? Drawing on philosopher Jacques Derrida’s definition of the specter, she underscores that specters do not necessarily provide a productive framework capable of repairing injustice. At times, they appear as figures of paternal authority, oppressive predecessors who not only watch over us but also restrict our freedom of agency. Chávez’s specter is precisely this kind of presence, one that demands allegiance and obedience to preserve the state of things and prevent us from betraying the ideals he represents.

What Troconis analyzes across five well-structured chapters are the traces of such presence, such spectrality. Her focus is not on the solemn commemorative objects produced by the state. Instead of statues or monuments, she hunts the specter’s objects as they circulate as a stencil-like urban image, as mass-produced merchandise like phone cards or toys, as memorabilia, or as endlessly reproducible digital memes. These objects belong to the everyday, because Chávez’s specter “moves in plain sight.”

Her interest in these kinds of material media lies in how quickly they become emotionally charged objects, blurring the boundaries between public and private spheres. The technological circumstances of our present, the digital archive and the influence of social media platforms on the political arena are present in her analysis. She reflects on the forms of animation these media enable, which allow the specter to remain among us. Her conceptualization of “afterglow” seeks to capture both the luminescence of screens and the “viscous” temporality they generate. This may take the form of a state-produced hologram of Chávez strolling through Caracas during a commemorative act or of popular creativity on social media. Both state-driven initiatives and grassroots practices play a fundamental role in sustaining the affective excess around Chávez—an excess that, as Troconis argues, produces either gratitude or rage, a polarization that ultimately forecloses political imagination. Her choice of “afterglow” seeks to recover a sense of futurity, in contrast to more conventional terms such as “aftermath” or the periodizing confidence of the prefix “post,” both of which foreclose openness.

In line with this perspective, the first chapter recalls Chávez’s illness and how it prepared the ground to “unleash” the magic that followed his death. The body of the nation and Chávez’s own flesh became indistinguishable, giving rise to popular rites and practices of healing with a strong element of embodied performance. After his death, these rites continued as acts of mourning, but they also fueled rumors and conspiracy theories about his corpse —rumors quickly politically captured and redirected through slogans such as “Chávez vive” (“Chávez is alive”) to secure allegiance. In this way, spectrality overtakes spectatorship, as Chávez’s specter was invoked both popularly and by the state.

Her second chapter, centered on Chávez’s ubiquitous eyes that overwhelm anyone moving through public space, especially in Caracas, is particularly strong in its treatment of temporality. The eyes are not interpreted solely in the sinister register of surveillance. She recognizes the Bolivarian Revolution’s monopoly over time, in which past, present and future are foreclosed within a “predictable againness.” Reflecting on the vastness of the memorabilia market, she also suggests that even if this omnipresence “does not contain us,” its very existence reaches us and becomes part of our political identity.

The third chapter marks a smooth transition from the public to the private sphere. Extending the panoptic experience explored in the second chapter, Chávez’s specter, in line with Derrida’s theory of hauntology and the “visor effect,” enters the intimate domain through collectibles and tattoos with his handwriting. Troconis reflects on the fatherly and paternal role that Chávez performed in life, and how, after his death, this image became marketable for domestic mourning. She draws on memory studies and scholarship on memory markets, showing how consumer logics and collectibles allow reproducible objects to acquire the aura of originals, as they gain special meaning for a collector. This chapter also enables her to develop further arguments about temporality and presence-in-absence, particularly through the typefont that mimics his handwriting, once again unsettling the distinction between copies and originals.

The necromantic practice becomes especially visible in the opening of the fourth chapter, in which Troconis recalls Maduro’s statements about Chávez’s spiritual reincarnation as a bird or a butterfly. Maduro, of course, inherited Chávez’s necromantic legacy, since Chávez himself had claimed, in Troconis’ words, to engage in “necromantic exchanges” with Bolívar. If Chávez haunts all Venezuelans, he most persistently haunts Maduro, casting him as the perpetual vice president of the Comandante eterno. Whereas the previous chapter examined the magical surplus produced and consumed by the people, this one turns to the official necromantic performance of animation and its transhuman aspirations, sustained above all by technology such as the commemorative hologram. However, what it uncovers is a spectrality present in bodily inheritances: gestures, poses, modes of speaking, all theatrical dimensions of Chávez. This performative legacy extends even to the Chavecito doll-toys, which Troconis situates in dialogue with the domestic echoes of the third chapter. Yet, as objects of play, they also demand an infusion of new life, therefore animation.

Before the final chapter, in which she engages with the artistic work of Deborah Castillo, Troconis inserts an “interlude” which could work better as a conclusion to reflect on her proposal for retrieving imagination not by erasing the bolivaroids that haunt the nation, but by remaining with the discomfort of memory without submitting to its chains. The last chapter takes Castillo’s exhibition RAW (2015) as its point of departure to argue for the necessity of making Chávez into the corpse he never was, allowing him a proper process of decomposition. This is understood not pejoratively, but as a transformative and natural unfolding. Castillo’s bodily encounters with the clay of her malleable statues inspire Troconis to envision a politics that does not rely on imagining new heroes, but instead fosters new forms of relationality. Her “commitment to the living” depends on raw, vibrant matter that resists solidification and evades capture by the epic.

Isabel J. Piniella Grillet is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, CNRS; and currently student of Curatorial Studies at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. She is the author of (Re)Generación 1958: Intelectuales, arte y política en Venezuela.