Contents -- Preface -- Introduction to the "Age of Diderot" -- A Self-Portrait -- Welcome, Stranger -- The Prophet and the Philosopher -- Image, Speech, and Truth -- A Happy Ending -- Part I: Diderot and the Problem of Metaphysics-D'Alembert's Dream -- 1 Life's Drama -- The Infinite Conversation and the Thinking of the Outside -- Sensibility and Materialism -- The Stone's Cry -- The Genesis of Life -- The Laboratory-Between Poetry and Science -- The Gaze of the Observer -- 2 Who Speaks?: Between Dreaming and Waking -- The Voice of Life -- The Dream of the Geometer -- Between the Doctor and the Woman-The Talking Cure -- The Dream Between Unity and Fragmentation -- To Bee or Not to Bee -- The Chain-Between Life and Signification or Between the Natural and the Symbolic -- 3 Two Images of the Image: The Bees and the Spider -- The Organism -- Insensibility-Organs -- Arachne-Image-The Giving of Insensibility -- Eros and Drama -- Sexuality and Monstrosity -- The Head and the Heart- Between Philosophy and Literature -- Speaking the Unspoken and the Birth of Freedom-Or, How to End an Infinite Conversation -- Part II: Three Short Experiments -- 4 The Identification with the Phantom: The Paradox of the Actor -- 5 Enlightenment's Pain: On Diderot's Dramatic Logic of the Senses: Letter on the Blind -- 6 The Drama of Inheritance and the Question of Revolution: A Conversation of a Father with His Children -- Conclusion: Diderot, Rousseau-The Self-Portrait of Modernity -- Absorption and Theatricality in the Age of Aesthetics -- The Cartesian Subject -- Autobiography and the Self-Portrait -- Negative and Positive Alienation -- Reality and Excess -- The Spectator and the Gaze -- The Memory of Pain -- The Voice of the Heart Between Rousseau and Diderot-Excess and the Mask -- Absorption and Theatricality-Take Two -- The Stage-Between Reality and the Phantom.

Curtain -- Notes -- Index.