GEORGES BATAILLE, Story of the Eye, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 1989

Paperback. Translated by Joachim Neugroschal. With essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. ISBN 0-14-018009-5.

The cover crops in tight on a single fragment of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés — 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.

The 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 Étant donnés le gaz d’éclairage et la chute d’eau — gas lamp before waterfall. Duchamp’s own title runs the other way: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage. 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.

Sontag’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,” Histoire de l’Oeil the most accomplished instance. Two thefts of context stacked on one back cover — Duchamp’s installation and Sontag’s argument, both flattened into blurb.

This 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.

Condition: Good used condition. General handling and edge wear, surface rubbing, light creasing and age-related spotting to covers; structurally sound.