Why was it France that spawned the radical post-structuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative intellectual & cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds new light on the origins of post-structuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers.

To explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts to literary works. She focuses on the criminal as a metaphor for an other self that the mental hygiene movement, French psychoanalysts, and the surrealists sought to rescue.

By exploring their construction so-called female crimes in particular, she traces how those movements, aimed at self-renewal, in fact laid the foundation for the undoing of identity. Dean considers, finally, how that dialectic of renewal and loss shaped the self that was theorized in different ways by Bataille and Lacan.