This essay explores the relationship between French Theory and the visual arts in the United States in the 1960s and 70s by focusing on the work of a single artist, the American artist Vito Acconci, and his reading of a single text, Maurice Blanchot's essay on the Marquis de Sade. This is pursued by a close examination of how the theoretical text could have been interpreted in a series of works that ostensibly do not share the overt scenarios of the Sadean imagination but in their relation to interaction and media sustain an operative sense of Blanchot's account.
This interpretation is considered within the broader historical and intellectual context of theory in France and in the USA, and how although French Theory became a major element of art discourse in the US in the 1970s there are significant lacunae when it comes to a commentary on this particular artist's work. Through the interpretation of Acconci's work and his reading of Blanchot a connection is made between its political dimension and the philosophical anarchism that has been a vital strand of French literary theory; the latter has been an ongoing theme in Continental philosophy over the past decade.