Abstract

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.