The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts by Jean Louis Schefer presents for the first time in English a selection of essays from the work of one of the most important French theorists of today. The essays represent the whole of Schefer's career - from the 1960s, when he was influenced by structuralism, to his more lyrical and autobiographical work of the 1990s, which meditate on the role of the spectator in relation to art practice.

Schefer considers the very nature of art, film, and writing through his close examination of artists as diverse as Uccello, Poussin, and Cy Twombly and writers such as Paul Valery and Roland Barthes. These provocative essays all register the writer's direct confrontation with various media in a way that stands as a corrective to the formal traditions of interpretation and criticism.

Autobiographical, yet theoretically informed and historically detailed, Schefer's work offers some of the most original interpretations of art available today.