Few would deny the influence that French post-structuralist thought has had on Americanist scholarship since the 1980s. In particular, the existence of a “turn” in cultural studies towards a historiography of American experience that focusses “mainly on representation, on the cultural/linguistic constructedness of reality, in order to ban essentialism” (50) is all but assumed in most cases. According to Herzogenrath, this model of “theory,” especially that which has evolved from the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, has been almost uniquely privileged in cultural studies above innumerable other methodological approaches. For the author of An American Body/Politic this focus on representation, and therefore also metaphor, has resulted in “a kind of blindspot in its field: materiality and the body” (14), which are reduced to a collection of linguistic constructs or images. This leaves the reality of the physical as a sort of unresolved remainder in the equation of representation. In this description, “culture” is afforded a regulating agency (a new position of objectivity, if you will) that transcends (or exists outside) the experience of the living subject or body politic. The author is right to point out the perversity of a perspective in which “culture” is rendered a mechanical force that observes and regulates a world largely absent of human agency.

To rectify this, so says Herzogenrath, American studies must begin to wrestle with the arguments of Gilles Deleuze, whose focus on the more dynamic and immanent relations generated by desiring, material subjects can move the cultural-studies debate away from “representation” and into the realm of organic forces such as “affect,” change and “becoming.” This “inverts” what the author sees as the dominant discourse of American studies as a discipline, in which abstract political structures or “institutions” are placed in the supreme position of mystically imbuing their subjects with life and meaning through metaphor.

This intervention is timely. By adopting a bottom-up approach that refocusses the debate away from representation and onto the affective relations of dynamic subjects, Herzogenrath's book significantly contributes to recent debates about the direction of American studies in the “postnational” or “globalized” world. Ideally, by relegating national institutions, metaphors and “machinic” systems, the subject of discourse is liberated from the burden of representation. Consequently, no scholar would be in the position of dictating what constituted “good” and “bad” forms of representation, democratically widening the “field imaginary” to include multiple, conflicting and dynamic experiences with innumerable implications for canonicity and pedagogy.

The strength of this book lies in its theoretical contributions, which are illuminating, invigorating and highly suggestive. After a remarkably lengthy introduction, the first three chapters concern America's Puritan past and are extremely impressive in highlighting how Deleuze's language, when combined with precise historical research, can be used to reinvigorate such age-old topics as “The Puritan's Two Bodies,” the Antinomian crisis and debates about inoculation of smallpox victims. The historicist approach that is utilized in these chapters is largely abandoned in the second half. Herzogenrath's readings of Walt Whitman and Henry Adams's work are far more about Deleuze than about their ostensible subjects. After laying such a valuable groundwork with earlier chapters, the final section on Detroit techno seems entirely superfluous to requirement in a book about American studies as a discipline.

This leads to a final criticism. Even as it attempts to renew the discipline by changing the direction of its focus, there is a certain irony in the fact that the author misses, or at least chooses to ignore, the way in which many of the goals of “A Deleuzian Approach” have already begun to be generated from within American studies without the presence of a specifically Deleuzian nomenclature. The author makes little or no reference to the recent “transnational” and “affective” turns in American studies. The conclusions of the book are “rhizomatic” in their potential connections, but the book in itself exhibits a peculiarly “closed” approach to the discipline it enlivens. Having said all of this, An American Body/Politic is a profound and important work that is recommended heartily.