Obama’s Rifts

Obama constructs links among signs of history to produce what I would call a punctual presidency, a presidency that is punctual in two senses: Obama works at the level of historical puncta, and he’s just in time. He is a figure who knows how to work with an evental logic of history, and how to transpose the evental logics of history into a means whereby change within the territory of the United States can be linked with transnational democratic possibilities. By impersonating a transnational institution that does not exist anywhere else on this planet, Obama has as one of his aspirations the desire to become the institution of transnational democracy that otherwise has not materialized.