{"title":"Susan Sontag","description":"\u003cp\u003eSusan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American writer, critic and public intellectual whose essays reshaped the language of cultural and aesthetic debate in the second half of the twentieth century. Her early collections — \u003cem\u003eAgainst Interpretation\u003c\/em\u003e (1966), \u003cem\u003eStyles of Radical Will\u003c\/em\u003e (1969) and \u003cem\u003eOn Photography\u003c\/em\u003e (1977) — established a critical practice that moved between art, film, literature and politics without subordinating any one to the others. Her essay \u003cem\u003eThe Pornographic Imagination\u003c\/em\u003e (1967), later collected in \u003cem\u003eStyles of Radical Will\u003c\/em\u003e, provided one of the most sustained critical accounts of Bataille’s \u003cem\u003eHistoire de l’Œil\u003c\/em\u003e and appeared in the 1989 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of \u003cem\u003eStory of the Eye\u003c\/em\u003e. Sontag was awarded the National Book Award in 2000 for her novel \u003cem\u003eIn America\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"georges-bataille-story-of-the-eye-penguin-1989","title":"GEORGES BATAILLE, Story of the Eye, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 1989","description":"\u003cp\u003ePaperback. Translated by Joachim Neugroschal. With essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. ISBN 0-14-018009-5.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe cover crops in tight on a single fragment of Marcel Duchamp’s \u003cem\u003eÉtant donnés\u003c\/em\u003e — a nude torso set against mottled green, photographed by the Arts Council of Great Britain from the work’s location in a private collection. Duchamp’s final major piece was built as a controlled encounter: a closed wooden door, two peepholes, a constructed tableau visible only from one fixed position, to one viewer at a time. None of that architecture survives the transfer. What’s left is the body, cropped, printed on card, and stacked with a Penguin logo and a two-line title block — an installation collapsed into packaging.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe back cover records the transaction with unusual precision, and gets one detail wrong in the process. Rights are properly credited: © ADAGP Paris, DACS, London 1989. But the title itself is printed \u003cem\u003eÉtant donnés le gaz d’éclairage et la chute d’eau\u003c\/em\u003e — gas lamp before waterfall. Duchamp’s own title runs the other way: \u003cem\u003e1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage\u003c\/em\u003e. A small reversal, but not a meaningless one. It’s the same operation happening at the level of a single sentence that’s already happened to the whole object: pass a fixed, deliberately ordered thing through another system, and something shifts, even when everyone involved is trying to get it right.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSontag’s own words on Bataille sit directly beneath the Duchamp credit, printed as the cover’s pull quote: his work indicates “the aesthetic possibilities of pornography as an art form,” \u003cem\u003eHistoire de l’Oeil\u003c\/em\u003e the most accomplished instance. Two thefts of context stacked on one back cover — Duchamp’s installation and Sontag’s argument, both flattened into blurb.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis specific pairing — Neugroschal’s translation, Sontag, Barthes, Duchamp on the cover — didn’t last. The Duchamp image was dropped when the same translation was later repackaged under Penguin Modern Classics; that edition carries no image credit at all. This copy therefore isn’t just another printing of a text that’s stayed continuously in print. It’s the physical record of one specific, short-lived publishing decision: Bataille, Duchamp, Barthes and Sontag, briefly and cheaply, in the same object.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: Good used condition. General handling and edge wear, surface rubbing, light creasing and age-related spotting to covers; structurally sound.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54542065729874,"sku":"TNR-2026-0639","price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Bataille_Georges._Story_of_the_Eye._1989.jpg?v=1788541694"}],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/susan-sontag.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}