The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat

That the nude painted by Manet (in a painting so conceptually new that it created a scandal in its day) achieves so much truth through such a minor detail, that ribbon that modernizes Olympia and, even more than a beauty mark or a patch of freckles would, renders her more precise and more immediately visible, making her a woman with ties to a particular milieu and era: that is what lends itself to reflection, if not divagation!
—from The Ribbon at Olympia''s Throat

In The Ribbon at Olympia''s Throat, Michel Leiris investigates what Lydia Davis has called the “expressive power of fetishism”: how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane.

Written in 1981, toward the end of Leiris''s life, The Ribbon at Olympia''s Throat serves as a coda