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The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, by Walter Benn Michaels. Princeton, June 2004. $24.95
There is something in what he writes, but there is not everything. In broad strokes Walter Benn Michaels critiques posthistoricism, poststructuralism, philosophers (Rorty, Rousseau), novelists (Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis), and literary critics (Judith Butler, Greenblatt, Deleuze and Guattari, de Man, Derrida) for the contemporary propensity to make ideology ontology, that is, to elide or ignore a set of beliefs into or in favor of a subject position. The fundamental strength and weakness of the argument is its formalism as Michaels draws together seemingly disparate structures of thought. He attempts to convince the reader that to believe in the importance of the text's materiality-the shape of the signifier-is to believe that a text has...