This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Messianic peace was signified by the person conservatives and liberals labeled “messiah” or “the One.”[1] The Nobel committee symbolically demonstrated deliverance by promises of “change” and “hope.”[2] One week before the award another part of a media eschaton materialized: publicly contemplating a military coup to thwart the “Obama problem.” Appealing to U.S. military leaders in eight, compact bullet points, a well-credentialed journalist wrote: “Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for ‘fundamental change’ toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.”[3] If right-wing American media, through its core of movement conservatism, announced Obama martyrdom, the Nobel Committee announced resurrection.
Totalitarianism is a curious phenomenon of modern history and is often said to be a very twentieth-century one, at least as far as developed liberal democracies are concerned. The archetype totalitarian states in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy defined their political order against the established liberal democratic systems that existed elsewhere in Europe, and we saw them off. Further backslapping was called for when the Soviet Empire disintegrated and democracy was able to spread throughout Eastern Europe. But, as should be expected with conceptual discussions such as these, it is not as simple as it first appears. Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition began to reach maturity in the context of a totalitarian Europe; the analyses of social structures and processes within modernity are shaped by the Fascist or Soviet state. But the categories of critique developed at this stage of Critical Theory are not anachronistic curiosities. The term “totalitarian” is a tricky one to define and apply. Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s article “Critical Theory and the Challenge of Totalitarianism” is both a historical discussion of the development, but also of the wider applicability, of ideas and theories surrounding totalitarianism. 
The similarities between the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) have recently been manifested in 
Nicole Burgoyne: One of your main concerns with psychoanalysis as it developed in America in the postwar era is that it accepted a commercialized and materialistic view of happiness as an ideal. One can see how this sort of obsession with living life to the fullest is at odds with Freud’s early work toward curing suffering individuals and his later theories on the repressive nature of society in general. Do you see this uniquely American form of psychoanalysis, which Adorno characterizes as the loss of the individual experience, as related to his critique of America’s culture industry? Why are these phenomena prominent in American culture as opposed to elsewhere? 
Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech to Congress on healthcare reform in some ways overshadowed the content of the speech itself. Had Wilson shouted out in another, non-American context, such as during the Prime Minister’s Question Time in the United Kingdom, he would have received little notice. But with an eye to the protocol and tradition surrounding presidential addresses to Congress in the United States, commentators from both the left and the right lambasted Wilson’s actions. Of course, Wilson was not without his supporters who seemed to have little concern for such protocols, or at least seemed to think that the gravity of the situation warranted violating the traditional standards. Still, Wilson’s yell stood in stark contrast to the lines offered at the end of Obama’s speech in which the President called for “[replacing] acrimony with civility.” 
