Body and Story

A welcome reflection on the condition of theory in the crepuscule of its idols. It searches ahead and backward; it looks all about a splendid variety of critical texts from French, German, and Anglo-American traditions; its own inconclusiveness becomes the very proof of its reading. Terdiman looks at theory from an angle that tends to be placed in the Enlightenment and dialectical philosophy and not from a point of allegiance with one Poststructuralist philosopher over another. -- Tom Conley, Harvard University

In analyzing these shifts he proposes a new model for understanding how seemingly unabridgeable theories legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and he suggests a new ethics for managing this coexistence.The title Body and Story refers to the division of categories which establishes one axis of this book: that which lies between the world understood in corporeal or material terms and the world understood as text. Richard Terdiman studies this contest between bodies and language--epistemological foundations for the Enlightenment and Postmodernity respectively--through the works of eighteenth-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot and of contemporary philosopher-icon Jacques Derrida. Terdiman argues that despite their very real and irreconcilable opposition, a constant negotiation or mutual interrogation has always taken place between these two domains of theory, even as the balance at times shifts to one side or the other. In analyzing these shifts at the center of the past few centuries' evolving understanding of human experience, he seeks also to develop a new model for understanding how theories can and do legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and to offer a new ethics for managing this coexistence.