Body and Story

The Ethics and Practice of Theoretical Conflict
Erscheinungsjahr 2006
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8543-3
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 465 g

In Body and Story, Richard Terdiman explores the tension between what might seem to be two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: as physical reality and as representation in language. In demonstrating the complicated relationship between these two modes of being, he also presents a new bold approach to the problem of conflicts between irreconcilable but equally compelling theoretical ideas.

Enlightenment rationalism is most often understood as maintaining that words can meaningfully refer to and grasp things in the material world, while Postmodernism famously argues that nothing exists outside of language. Terdiman challenges this clean distinction, finding the early seeds of Postmodern doubt in the Enlightenment, and demonstrating the stubborn resistance of material reality—particularly that of the body—to language even today. Building on readings of works by 18th-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot and contemporary philosopher-icon Jacques Derrida, Terdiman argues that despite their genuine and profound opposition, a constant negotiation or mutual interrogation has always been taking place between these two world-views, even as the balance at times shifts to one side or the other. 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Terdiman, Richard

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Introduction: Difference in Theory
Part I: The Consequentiality of Bodies
1. The Nun Who Never Was
2. On the Matter of Bodies
3. The Body and the Text
4. Materiality, Language, and Money
Part II: The Conflict of Theories
5. The Enlightenment Discovers Postmodernism
6. The Epistemology of Difference
7. Materiality, Resistance, and Time
In-Conclusion: An Ethics of Theory
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Terdiman, Richard
Richard Terdiman is a professor of literature and the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.