The Cut: Reading Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs)

Patrick ffrench gives an imaginative theoretical reading of the unsettling masterpiece, Histoire de l'oeil (1928), by the French writer Georges Bataille, recognized now as a major figure in twentieth-century French literature. Bataille's erotic and disturbing text is a traumatic event in the history of modernity, provoking critical moments in the trajectories of structuralism and in the recent theorizations around his notion of the informe.