Passive Nihilism: Cultural Historiography and the Rhetorics of Scholarship

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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 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, Passive Nihilism argues that the concept of 'passive nihilism' sustains such discourses, giving the human sciences a reactive and idealist gloss. Modern scholarly writing is critiqued for its embrace of the logic of the least negative, its affirmation of nihilism. In this highly charged political/epistemic/rhetorical cultural mix, Cohen draws upon the notions of de Man and Deleuze as the most engaged and critical theorists in offering alternatives to the contemporary 'new histories' of high scholarly writing.