{"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\/products\/georges-bataille-story-of-the-eye-penguin-1989","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}