In Body and Story Richard Terdiman explores the tension between what have seemed two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: as directly experienced physical reality and as representation in language. In demonstrating the historically more complicated relationship between these two conceptions, he also offers a new approach to the problem of conflicts between irreconcilable but equally compelling theoretical ideas.

Englightenment rationalism maintains that words can meaningfully refer to and grasp things themselves in the material world, while Postmodern theory (in)famously argues that nothing exists outside of language. Terdiman challenges this clean distinction, finding the early seeds of Poststructuralist doubt in the Englightenment and demonstrating the stubborn resistance of material reality-particularly that of the body-to language even today.

Building on readings of works by eighteenth-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 taken place between these two world-views, even as the balance at times has shifted to one side or the other. In analyzing these shifts he proposes a new model for understanding how seemingly incompatible theories legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and suggests a new critical ethics for managing this coexistence.