Description
Book SynopsisConsiders the ways in which historical narratives summon up a past and lay down a future in the ever-multiplying intellectual debates of contemporary public culture. This book looks at some struggles to control public history, examining popular newspaper accounts of events - misrepresentation from the bottom up - in geopolitics and art.
Trade ReviewCohen has established himself as one of the harshest critics of the academy in general, and the historical discipline in particular... Worth reading. -- Phillippe Carrard Clio 2006 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. -- Michael Mirabile Postmodern Culture 2006 Elegant and eloquent on the topic of how French theorists help us to understand the limitations of neopositivist constructions' temporality. -- Carolyn J. Dean Journal of Modern History 2008
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
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
