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