With a plethora of self-citations that span across several decades, Annette Michelson’s previously unpublished lecture, “Transgression and Institution: The Cinema of the American Avant-Garde,” is a conveniently condensed anthology of her own writings, and as such provides an accessible introduction for new readers, replete with editorial annotations identifying the original source material for further study. It is also a handy refresher for those who have not read the primary literature in a while. As for the serious scholar, the lecture features a new development in Michelson’s lifelong inquiry into the radical aspiration of contemporary avant-garde cinema via an aesthetic of transgression—an aesthetic, moreover, that she had written about at length in the late 60s, though focusing then primarily on minimalist sculpture. For the question of cinema and transgression had not yet entered the picture and only begins to do so in the early 80s and into the 90s with “Transgression and Institution,” that is, once the figure of Georges Bataille takes center stage as “the master of transgression” in Michelson’s theoretical imaginary. This critical introduction to the lecture offers a genealogical account of Michelson’s relatively late assimilation of Bataille’s heterology in an effort to unpack the lengthy passage from the latter’s late study on eroticism and its relevance for renewing the former’s essential thought on the radical aspiration.