Anne Norton's new book is allusive in its form and elusive in its argument. These attributes are entailed in her approach to political theory and her understandings of language and time. She is tough to pin down, which is what she would seem to desire. Norton tosses the words and images of her study, drawn from the Old and New Testaments as well as Franz Fanon, into a nonlinear discourse that she says constitutes modernity.

Norton begins by asserting that “we stand at the horizon of [an] order” that “is visible and active in the coupling and opposition, the oscillations and transubstantiations, the rivalries and alliances, between two axes, one constituted between the poles of word and flesh, the other between openness and closure” (p. 1). The word encompasses constitutions, scripture, titles, and dictates, while the flesh involves birth, kinship, sexuality, violence, and mortality: “Openness is physical, literary, and political, manifest in the bodies of women and in revolution. Closure belongs to systematic reasoning, to orders and institutions, to the bodies of men” (p. 1). According to the worldview she associates with modernism, we should expect that we have moved progressively from the open and the bodily to the closed and the written, but retracing the footsteps of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, Norton unsurprisingly discovers that the story is not so simple.

Norton demonstrates how the binary distinctions represented by the two axes intersect in such cases as the Requerimiento, a document produced by the Spanish government and read whenever Spanish officers encountered the peoples of the Americas. The document stated not only the Spanish crown's claim on the territories occupied by the indigenous peoples, but also the benefits that would befall them if they acquiesced and the violence that awaited them if they did not. In the author's reading, the Requerimiento was not something separate from violence upon the body, but “produced it, set it in motion” (p. 27). She also invokes the variety of writings associated with revolutions, from the revelatory claims to legitimacy articulated in the Declaration of Independence to the veiling of power through writing in both the old and new regimes in France. In all these cases, words entailed bloodshed.

As regards the revolutionary experience in England, most compelling is her discussion of the Glorious Revolution and of William and Mary. Here, Norton's themes of word and flesh play out through the Dutch stadholder's ascension to the English throne by virtue of the Declaration of Right and of Mary's denial of her own lineage and willing subservience to her husband. And Norton's enthusiasms are evident in her treatment of Edmund Burke, William Blake, and Thomas Carlyle, highlighting their extravagant metaphors. It is clearly that extravagance of expression, like Nietzsche's, that seems to have drawn her to these figures. She revels in their language and finds much there to sustain her main themes.

When Norton proposes that we are at the horizon of this order, it appears to be because we can now see it for what it is, and because the separations and distinctions within which, and by which, it operates are breaking down. And while authorial intent and historical context are rejected as constraints upon interpretation, she claims a political purpose in the present. She means to show by her examples from the past that the writings of the poststructuralists “have a presence in the flesh, and these are matters not of the word but of the world…. The death of the author and the dissemination of authority find their political forms in regicide and the Terror, in the peasants who soaked their bread in the blood of Louis Capet, and the burned cafés of Algiers” (p. 4). Hence her title. Her book is thus part of a political project, another contribution to the deconstruction of the order. Gay rights activism and queer theory, feminism, environmentalists, and animal rights activists are among those who are also challenging “the economy of openness and closure in which contemporary political bodies are constituted” (p. 24).

Less modestly, Norton asserts: “Reading Nietzsche, or Foucault, or Derrida, or any of those whose faith in closure is suspect produces the effects of the Medusa in the agents and beneficiaries of the rational legal order. Men claim that such insights leave them paralyzed, unable to act effectively in the political world. They are made impotent by the sight of lack” (p. 161). This effectively puts poststructuralism beyond criticism, because anyone who questions whether it has any instrumental political worth or provides a coherent political criticism of contemporary systems of power is ipso facto lining up on the side of closure and order against that of openness and revolution. But she does not cite a single critic, giving her polemic a straw man quality. Similarly, when she makes the remarkable statement that Luce Irigaray “reads Plato more carefully, more respectfully, more thoroughly, than those who purport to honor him, for she read without excising the myths and the jokes that embarrass too many contemporary philosophers,” she disdains any references to other interpreters of Plato (p. 169). It is hard to escape the impression that Norton is arbitrarily dividing the world up into friends and enemies and that her rhetoric has gotten the better of her. When she is most emphatic about the politics of poststructuralism, she creates the sort of binaries that she otherwise abhors.

That is not the only problem. Early on, she writes that, “when Oliver Cromwell called Charles Stuart the ‘Man of Blood,’ he alluded not merely to his lineage nor to his acts of violence, but to the substance of his authority” (p. 10). In a footnote, she recounts a conversation she had with John Pocock, who argued that Cromwell referred only to Charles Stuart's acts of violence. Norton maintains instead that “the words ‘Man of Blood’ reveal the meanings immanent in them over time, in the hearing of those many generations removed from the time of their first utterance” (p. 183, n. 1). Such a position strains the meaning of “he alluded to,” which, in normal English usage, entails intent, and by dogmatically ascribing autonomy to language, Norton has begged the question; she has asserted as an assumption what Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists is meant to establish.

Norton's proclamation that we stand at the horizon of an order entails a backward glance. But her simultaneous claim that her book, and the work of poststructuralists in general, is political in the present opens a gap. Her invocation of contemporary activism points to a lack. Aside from a few general references to postcolonial theory, the politics of globalization and its resistances are absent from her discussion. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the “revolutions” of 1989 passes without notice. The furor over religious fundamentalism goes unremarked upon. There is an almost willfully blinkered aspect to Norton's own gaze. She understands “the central debates of our time, in politics and the academy” to be centered on the connection between sexuality and language (p. 160). That may sound plausible, even compelling to some; others will insist that there are other, equally urgent debates that define “our time.”