Herbert Blau here reflects on performance as it moved from the theatricalized activism of the sixties into the theoretical activism of the eighties. The essays theorize rather than formulate an ideological program. Blau takes risks at the speculative edge of thought. The Eye of Prey is comprised of diverse subject matter: love and mourning, play and aging, radical feminist and homosexual discourse, the politics of representation, comedy since the Absurd, Barthes and Beckett, Beckett and Derrida—a critique of certain aspects of postmodern thought and performance, and in particular the ideological program of "the subject of desire."
