History out of joint

by Sande Cohen

"In History Out of Joint, Sande Cohen considers the ways in which historical narratives summon up a past and lay down a future in the ever-multiplying intellectual debates of contemporary public culture. As competing factions advance contradictory principles to validate or discredit their preferred accounts of the past and the present, Cohen argues that the fundamental question of how these principles themselves should be addressed - of what truly constitutes the use or abuse of history - has been pushed aside. Taking Nietzsche's idea of a simultaneous production and "anti-production" of culture as his starting point, Cohen proposes that the real abuse lies in the attempt to establish one version of history by effacing every other and shows how this now prevalent idea of historiography reduced to a political resource has itself become a "normal" starting point of such abuse." "Cohen looks first at some current struggles to control public history, examining popular newspaper accounts of