Passive Nihilism: Cultural Historiography and the Rhetorics of Scholarship

Examining multiple academic discourses, Passive Nihilism 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." Sande Cohen argues 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, 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, Passive Nihilism argues that the concept of "passive nihilism" sustains such discourses, giving the human sciences a reactive and idealist gloss.