Dramatic Experiments: Life according to Diderot

SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought

by Eyal Peretz

A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot.

Dramatic Experiments offers a comprehensive study of Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of European modernity. Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, art critic, and editor of the first major modern encyclopedia. He is known for having made lasting contributions to a number of fields, but his body of work is considered too dispersed and multiform to be unified. Eyal Peretz locates the unity of Diderot's thinking in his complication of two concepts in modern drama and the image. Diderot's philosophical theater challenged the work of Plato and Aristotle, inaugurating a line of drama theorists that culminated in the twentieth century with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. His interest in the artistic image turned him into the first great modern theorist of painting and perhaps the most influential art critic of modernity. With these innovations, Diderot provokes a rethinking of major philosophical problems relating to life, the senses, history, and appearance and reality, and more broadly a rethinking of the relation between philosophy and the arts. Peretz shows Diderot to be a radical thinker well ahead of his time, whose philosophical effort bears comparison to projects such as Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis.

Eyal Peretz  is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of  Becoming Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses  and of  Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of A Reading of Moby-Dick .

271 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Eyal Peretz works at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film studies. His work is an attempt to redraw the relations between philosophy and the arts by examining various ways in which works of art and philosophical texts enter into a new type of dialogue in the age that has been defined as post enlightenment. This age, from the point of view of these interests, is characterized by two main intellectual projects: the rise of Aesthetics, thus of the introduction of the question of the significance of art into the heart of philosophy, and what has been called the critique of metaphysics, thus the critique of the logic guiding classical philosophy from Plato to Immanuel Kant.
His first book, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: a Reading of Moby-Dick (Stanford UP 2003) examined the relations between literature and philosophy within this context. His second book, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses (Stanford UP 2008), dealt with philosophy and film. In the meantime, he co-edited with Emily Sun and Ulrich Baer The Claims of Literature: The Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham University Press, 2007). His book Dramatic Experiments is a reading of various writings by the major enlightenment philosopher and writer, Denis Diderot, a transitional figure between enlightenment thinking and post-enlightenment. He proposes to examine the significance of dramatic theater for the rethinking of philosophy’s relation to the arts. More recently, he has published The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame. He is currently finishing a monograph on Leonardo da Vinci. Peretz is also the editor of the Yearbook of Comparative Literature.