David Schmid nominates Slavoj Žižek!
Dear President-Elect Obama,
In the past few months, you’ve received a lot of advice, and doubtless you’ll receive a lot more in the months and years to come. Let me improve the ratio of useful to useless advice by recommending that you appoint Slavoj Žižek as the USA’s first ever Secretary of Culture.
Apart from dramatically improving America’s reputation with the rest of the world, this appointment has several other advantages, some of which are so obvious that they barely need commenting upon. Can’t sleep at night? Go down to the White House kitchen for milk and cookies and you’ll probably find Žižek at the table, writing and ready to talk about anything—and I do mean anything. Faced with someone asking you how your administration differs from previous administrations? Simply point out that Žižek is a member of your cabinet, and even the most hostile questioner will lapse into stunned, chastened silence.
In the remainder of this letter, however, I want to draw your attention to some other, less obvious benefits that come from Žižek’s presence in your administration, all of which have to do with his value as a symptom. A symptom of what, you ask? Of your desire to keep thinking, a desire that you will understandably feel a need to repress as soon as your inauguration is completed. Don’t get me wrong. You are obviously a thoughtful person, especially compared to the members of the House of Bush, where thought has been at its lowest ebb for many years. But the Presidency has been construed as the place of action par excellence, and sometimes you will instead need to follow Zizek’s advice: “Faced with a disaster over which we have no real influence, people will often say, stupidly, ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ Perhaps, lately, we have been doing too much. Maybe it is time to step back, think and say the right thing."
Avoiding the dangers associated with precipitate action, the hallmark of the previous eight years, is just one area in which Žižek can help you. You’ll be surrounded by people selling you their version of the big picture, but Žižek has perhaps the biggest of all: “At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts” (Violence:Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2008, 1). Unlike your predecessor, who was so dazzled by the spectacle of violence that he could not or would not go any deeper, listen to Žižek when he tells you of “‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (1.). I know it’s unlikely you’ll want to follow Žižek down this path, for as we all know, politicians should never be expected to rise above the source of their power, and you did raise an awful lot of money. But I can dream. Call it my own version of the audacity of hope.
But where Žižek can be of most use of you is at that place where the relation between thinking and violence broke down most catastrophically during the Bush years: 9/11. The ground zero of a hasty reaction to a spectacular “subjective” violence, 9/11 now provides you with a chance to really make a lasting difference, but only if you remember Žižek’s description of the opportunity that faced the United States after the attacks: “"Either America will persist in, strengthen even, the attitude, 'Why should this happen to us? Things like this don't happen here!'--leading to more aggression toward the threatening Outside, in short: a paranoiac acting out--or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making its long-overdue move from 'Things like this should not happen here!' to 'Things like this should not happen anywhere!'" (“Welcome to the Desert of the Real!” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 385-389, p. 389).
Take Žižek’s hand, President-Elect Obama, and step through the screen. And take the rest of us with you.
David Schmid
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