The Big Toe
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Big Toe[1] ("Le gros orteil") is an essay by French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897 – 1962) first published in Documents (1929, issue 6) accompanied by three photos by Jacques-André Boiffard (1902 - 1961).
The photos were close-ups of big toes, two of man's big toe (30 years old) and one by a woman (aged 24).
Incipit of the essay:
- "The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, or gibbon)." tr. Iain White
One of Boiffard's toes is depicted on the cover of Rosalind E. Krauss's book The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
Roland Barthes's 1972 text on Georges Bataille, "Les sorties du texte," references it extensively.
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