Introduction: posing the question Geoff Bennington and Robert Young; Part I. History, Marxism and the Institution: 1. Demanding history Geoff Bennington; 2. Speculations on reading Marx: after reading Derrida Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; 3. Texts in history: the determinations of readings and their texts Tony Bennett; 4. Criticism and institutions: the American university Jonathan Culler; Part II. Difference and History: 5. History traces Marian Hobson; 6. Derrida and Foucault: writing the history of historicity Ann Wordsworth; 7. The practice of historical investigation Mark Cousins; Part III. Aesthetics and History: 8. Of aesthetic and historical determination Rodolphe Gashé; 9. The sign of history Jean-François Lyotard; Part IV. History as Text: 10. Language as history/history as language: Saussure and the romance of etymology Derek Attridge; 11. Fallen differences, phallogocentric discourses: losing Paradise Lost to history Mary Nyquist; 12. Ezra Pound: the erasure of history Maud Ellmann; 13. The phonograph in Africa: international phonocentrism from Stanley to Sarnoff William Pietz; Notes on the contributors; Index.