| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Sande Cohen. History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History. (Parallax, Re-Visions of Culture and Society.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006. Pp. vii, 307. $55.00.

In his first book Sande Cohen mounted a critique of academic "historical culture" (Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline [1986]); here he expands his view to historical writing more generally, although the readership is unspecified. This book, which claims to be a work of "philosophical criticism" (p. 2), is a set of complex variations on post-Nietzschean themes in which the author worries over a large number of contemporary opinions and (largely French) post–World War II theories about history, both event and interpretation. With almost every argument built on a quotation or its refutation, the book illustrates Friedrich Nietzsche's view that "there are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively enduring is our opinion" (The Will to Power). Yet somehow Cohen hopes to connect "history" as historiography and history as culture, and for him, as for Nietzsche, this means working out the paradoxes of language. Cohen is skeptical about historical knowledge but not really about his opinions and the possibility of "escaping from" narration for the public good. In this effort Cohen also turns to the Los Angeles Times, Joel Fineman, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and many others. Not that he wants to be bound to the past, for he says, "I read Nietzsche because I am besieged by words of command" (p. 34), and as "last reader" he wants to be his own master.

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