Abstract

This paper examines the Barack Obama memes recently circulating in protests and online as examples of fantasies that construct the President as the obscene “Neighbor” who steals white conservative jouissance. It will focus on the shift from Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” poster to images of Obama as the Joker that parody it. From analysis of the Joker images will emerge how their representation of Obama as an ill defined but potentially malevolent racial and conspiratorial excess to Americanism, who is thus responsible for the country’s socio-economic decline, serves to obstruct urgently needed interrogation of neoliberal policies and practices. It situates these memes in the American context of what alternately has been called the “crisis of symbolic investiture” , the “decline of symbolic efficiency” or the advent of a conspiratorial “psychotic discourse” . Within this context, in which breakdown of belief in the big Other leads to a collapse in the mediation of the symbolic order, Obama reverses from a figure of “hope” into one of sadistic persecution not unlike the Joker character depicted in the 2008 film, The Dark Knight. These images will thus serve as a nexus for discussion of political, cultural and psychoanalytic registers of discontent in the emergent Age of Obama