A reflection on the metaphor of the body politic throughout American history

Bernd Herzogenrath’s An American Body|Politic is a study of the intersection between the material, biological body and body as political and cultural metaphor in American politics, religion, literature, and popular culture. Deeply influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Herzogenrath’s approach to American culture encompasses endless possibilities and potentials, eschewing the mechanic and structural. He traipses through American history and culture, pausing to examine such varied facets as the Puritans’ “two bodies,” Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy, Cotton Mather and smallpox, the poetics|politics of Whitman, Henry Adams’s stroll along the shores of complexity, and the Detroit-based techno music of today.

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Reviews / Endorsements



“How interinvolved are bodies and politics? What human sensitivities enable us to probe such imbrications? What happens if they are blocked? Bernd Herzogenrath explores these issues as he brings Gilles Deleuze to bear to probe the pretexts and contexts of work by Americans such as Cotton Mather, Walt Whitman, and Henry Adams. An exciting, creative and indispensable book!”—William E. Connolly, author of A World of Becoming

“This is a wonderful book, an amazing book. It gets right to the heart of things: the intersection of the corporeal and the political, the social and the psychological in the plans and aspirations, the polemics and disease, the slavery and war, the love and hope that mark our history, literature, and politics, our very lives, individual and communal. The intelligence and scope of the argument is truly impressive. It will teach Deleuzians about America and Americanists about Deleuze. A deep, rich, wide-ranging, and important book that I highly recommend.”—John Protevi, Professor, Department of French Studies, Louisiana State University

“Bernd Herzogenrath proposes a profound yet novel idea: perhaps Deleuze and Guattari, pre-eminent French philosophers, may help to provide a new direction in American Studies, one that orients it away from questions of language and representation and to questions of creation, force and change. Perhaps these theorists of materiality and the real can provide a new approach, a new direction, and new methods and concepts by which to think the coming-to-be and the ongoing existence of ‘The United States.’ This book is a breath of fresh air! It opens up new fields and methods in thinking about culture and the political.”—Elizabeth Grosz, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University