Nothing here will contradict Mark's analysis of the content challenges Americans face post-election. But following Ed Kazarian (blog, website) on Facebook, I found the formal elements of these passages about Obama in a piece by Charles Pierce to have a distinct Deleuzean echo:
He came into this office a figure of history, unlike anyone who's become president since George Washington. The simple event of him remains a great gravitational force in our politics. It changes the other parts of our politics in their customary orbits. It happens so easily ... that you hardly notice that it has happened until you realize that what you thought you knew about the country and its people had been shifted by degrees until it is in a completely different place....
But the history that propels him is not the history that many of us learned in school. It is the underground history of the country... And it is through him, maybe, that the underground history is fully integrated at last into the history of the country, that it is acknowledged at last as what it always has been — an important element to be used in the constant re-creation of our political commonwealth....
The creative project of self-government — hard and frustrating but necessary — is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene.
Now I did excise some "identitarian" elements -- those that emphasize Obama's personal characteristics -- to play up the "differential" elements in Pierce's work, but all in all the idea that an event changes the past, present, and future seems very Deleuzean. Pierce claims that with Obama, current political forces change their "orbits," past elements are shifted in their significance, and the future opens new horizons in which a project can "change sometimes by the minute" -- that is, a future in which "only difference returns" (to allude to the Difference and Repetition reading of the Eternal Return, analyzed here by James Williams).
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