Crazy Little Thing Called Change

The new U.S. president Barack Obama finally gave the inauguration speech awaited in anticipation by billions of people all along the world. I have to admit that I’m fully satisfied with his speech, I think he perfectly demonstrated that why people have voted for him and also why he is the embodiment of the ruling class consensus on the urgent need for reconstruction of the collective consciousness.

My early assessment of Obama was he is just another American politician who has his share of inevitable subjective commitment to the capitalist parliamentary democracy and thus his rhetoric about change and the constituents’ passionate yearning for a sort of unidentified justice which is also mobilized around this little object “change” is merely the setting that frames the existing political reality. This little object “change” frames the reality merely by its extraction from the setting and in this vein forming a window by its absence on the middle. This was my alleged Lacanian interpretation: The object called change frames the political reality only with its absence, when really there is no change. Here, Badiouean interpretation has already been given: You cannot participate in a system without a subjective commitment to it. “We must keep our distance from this subjective figure of politics”.

But after his nominations and this inaugural jamboree and the speech that he gave, now, I’m convinced that he is really after some substantial chance. In the Marxist perspective, the change is obvious: In the minds of the crises, the common affairs of bourgeoisie are now much more complicated that the executives of the state must find a way to restore the previous contradictions among the ruling class and remind them their common interests. I think Mr. Obama is more than capable to accomplish this restorative function.