Rosalind Krauss's 'The Optical Unconscious' Published in French

The French translation of Rosalind Krauss's 'The Optical Unconscious' has been released by Au même titre éditions, nearly a decade after its original US publication. Krauss, a prominent art historian and theorist, critiques modernist theories of pure visuality championed by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Borrowing the term from Walter Benjamin, she argues for an 'optical unconscious'—a blind spot within vision that disrupts the subject's mastery. The book examines how 20th-century artists like Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and Alberto Giacometti explored this concept, moving beyond Surrealist imagery to engage with the repressed as a plastic process. Krauss draws on Freud and Lacan to analyze the gap at the heart of vision, and interprets Georges Bataille's 'formless' from a concrete, spatial perspective. This material later informed the 1996 exhibition 'L'Informe' at the Centre Pompidou, co-curated by Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. The translation highlights the delayed access French readers have to key theoretical works.