Much is said, and has been said, about the body in recent decades, but this short, subversive treatise by Hans Bellmer had remained confined to an esoteric circulation. Bellmer was the painter who, together with Max Ernst, injected into Surrealism a demonic charge that traced its origins to early German Romanticism. Since the 1930s, when he invented his perverse Doll, a figure with which he would keep up a long and scandalous cohabitation, he was an extreme theorist and experimenter of the body, which he turned inside out like so many gloves in his erotic paintings and drawings, at once algebraic and incandescent. The anatomical presence of sex and the physical unconscious that dwells in every body, the rudiments of a metaphysics of the voyeur, the ability of limbs to transform into a series of hallucinatory doubles are the themes and traces of this text, which in turn splits, with perfect consistency, into a series of masterly drawings, as if to show us the violent jolt to all our perception that the author's subtly set-out theories entail. The publisher classifies the book under French literature, art and eros.