Starting from an eye that sees an egg, the sun, the genitalia of the bull, Bataille –who had an unusual interdisciplinary talent, drawing on diverse influences and diverse modes of discourse to create his work– introduces us to the atavistic fear of the fear of pleasure and reveals it to us, likewise, as a repetitive approach to erotic content, repulsive with its social borders with the forbidden and evil. It is a novel open to an interrogation that is unleashed invariably and obsessively about sexual excesses. In the words of Roland Barthes, in this work Bataille “forces” the choice of images in the combination of the two metaphorical chains used to create a kind of matrix structure. The result is a metonymic eroticism that undoes the usual contiguities of objects to replace them with new encounters, albeit limited by the persistence of a single theme within each metaphor.

Bataille's works begin precisely with Historia del ojo, published in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch, becoming the writer's first important book. This novel was initially read as pure pornography; meanwhile, the interpretation of the work matured over time to reveal its considerable emotional and philosophical depth, characteristic of other writers categorized within the "literature of transgression." The images in this novel are built on a series of metaphors that in turn refer to philosophical constructions developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the sun, the earth, the testicle.

This novel is considered the masterpiece of erotic literature; its pages concentrate three of the main obsessions of Georges Bataille: surrealism, sex and death. All of them locked up and confronted with the particular faith of this French writer. Thus, Simone, the protagonist, transgresses each of the norms of moral behavior to become the incarnation of "unconscious desire" and, also, of sin, punishment, pleasure and death.