Reviews
Cohen has established himself as one of the harshest critics of the academy in general, and the historical discipline in particular... Worth reading.
Even the book's most contestable critical interventions produce valuable insights that might have been missed in a less ambitious book... The interest of the book consequently far exceeds the specific disciplinary frame professional historians would likely bring to it.
Elegant and eloquent on the topic of how French theorists help us to understand the limitations of neopositivist constructions' temporality.
An intensely directed essay in historiography—how and where history is done and what it does—not about how to write history more accurately or effectively, but how to read history writing and its effects more critically. Cohen's theoretical tools are Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, and Lyotard, and his explications of their difficult texts are first-rate, as are his critical but generous readings of Derrida's Specters of Marx and Joel Fineman's History of the Anecdote.
Book Details
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Philosophical Prelude: On the Difference between an Event and a Narrative
Part I: On Reading History
Chapter 1. Nietzsche and Us: Last Readers
Chapter 2. How to Make an
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Philosophical Prelude: On the Difference between an Event and a Narrative
Part I: On Reading History
Chapter 1. Nietzsche and Us: Last Readers
Chapter 2. How to Make an Ahistorical People: The Island Taiwan
Chapter 3. Art Criticism and Intellectuals in Los Angeles: Desperate Narrations
Chapter 4. Figuring Forth the Historian Today: On Images and Goals
Chapter 5. A Critical Analysis of the Historiographic Anecdote
Part II: Affirmation and the Philosophy of History
Chapter 6. Derrida's "New Scholar": Between Philosophy and History
Chapter 7. The Use and Abuse of History according to Jean-François Lyotard
Chapter 8. The Genealogy of History according to Deleuze and Guattari
Chapter 9. Nothing Affirmative Ever Dies: Deleuze's Notion of Time and History in Difference and Repetition
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index