French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Dominguez Leiva, Decapitations.
Art and Visual Culture
Antonio Dominguez Leiva
Decapitations: From Skull Cults to Gore Cinema
PUF, "European Literatures" series, 2005.
Paperback - 264 pages
Publisher's Description
Through the gore image of decapitation, a genealogy of torture and the macabre emerges, opening up a history of the relationship between violence and representation in the West. Three major historical periods stand out, inaugurated by the spectacle of public torture as an economy of power—a paradigm extending from ancient sacrifice to the theater of cruelty in the Baroque era. It is during this time that a progressive eroticization of decapitation begins, which would come to haunt all of Western sexuality. The Baroque explosion of severed heads is followed by the control of bodies and their representations, culminating in the dream of carceral societies, transforming the logic of torture to arrive at the paradoxical figure of the guillotine. Finally, the symbolic economy of the disciplinary society enters a crisis within postmodernity: decapitation is then haunted both by the inflation of spectacular violence and by the construction of death as a taboo.
Antonio Dominguez Leiva is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Burgundy. He is the author of Laberinto imaginario de Jan Potocki (UNED/Visor). He is currently preparing an essay on Life as a Dream: From Shamanism to The Matrix.
Review forthcoming in Acta Fabula.
Published in the European Literatures series by Presses Universitaires de France, this study offers a compelling genealogy of the macabre and the mechanisms of power. Antonio Dominguez Leiva traces the evolution of the severed head across three distinct historical epochs, examining how society has continually renegotiated the boundaries between bodily horror and artistic expression. By moving from ancient ritual sacrifice and the Baroque theater of cruelty to the rise of carceral disciplinary structures and contemporary cinema, the book maps a vast intellectual terrain regarding visual culture and societal taboos.
Rooted in comparative literature and cultural analysis, this volume will especially interest scholars and students of modern media, visual studies, and the philosophy of violence. It provides essential critical tools for understanding how contemporary horror and gore genres inherit centuries of symbolic representations of death. Researchers exploring the intersections of aesthetics, anthropology, and power will find this exploration of the grotesque a valuable contribution to the ongoing discourse on representation and the human body.