Sande Cohen

History is not the nature or foundation of knowledge, but is rather a language of cultural conventions concerning remembrances of the past. As a system of intellectual history, structuralism argues that historians do not consign meaning to texts of the past. The historians' practice, itself, introduces sense and logic into a past text before that text has meaning. Historical practice, then, presupposes culture. It can be understood by uncovering the linguistic rules which determine what structures and messages can count as historical knowledge. Ideas as different as those of Husserl and Wittgenstein, for example, share the common syntactical basis of philosophy. The primary question for history should not be "What did that mean?" but "How did that phenomenon qualify for a category called history and how has historical writing acquired discursive power?"

What does it mean to"do theory" in America? In what ways has "French Theory" changed American intellectual and artistic life? How different is it from what French intellectuals themselves conceived, and what does all this tell us about American intellectual life? Is "French Theory" still a significant force in America, raising conceptual questions not easily answered? In this volume of new work--including the French writers Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilled Delezue, as well as essays by Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen, Mario Biagoli, Elie During, Chris Kraus, Alison Gingeras, and Kriss Ravetto, among others--French theorists assess the impact and reception of their work in America, and American-based critics account for their effects in different areas of cultural criticism and art over the last thirty years.

Examining multiple academic discourses, this book argues that contemporary models of history, culture, and language are reactive and that their mix of epistemology, rhetoric, and politics is too explosive for the interpretations associated with 'normal criticism'. The author contends that 'cultural historiography' is a discourse that makes 'orders' and 'cultural timings' out of language, showing the inseparability of rhetoric, epistemology and politics in the discourses of the 'human sciences'. Reading texts as distinct as professional history writing and Derrida's Specters of Marx, Carlo Ginzburg's metahistorical projections, Bruno Latour's anti deconstructive model of science studies, art curatorial models of history and neo psychoanalysis' obsessive turn to negation, the book starts that the concept of 'passive nihilism' sustains such discourses, giving the human sciences a reactive and idealist gloss.