T H E C RA D L E O F H U MAN I TY

Steven Ungar's essay "Phantom Lascaux: Origin of the Work of

Art" - the response to Bataille's writings on prehistory has been
characterized by indifferent silence. 3 Perhaps this response is not
entirely inappropriate. One purpose of the present collection is
to break this silence by reasserting the place of prehistory in
Bataille's thought. Toward that end, this introduction will elabo-
rate several major themes consistently present in Bataille's treat-
ment of prehistoric art and culture, both in this collection and in
his corpus as a whole. 4
Bataille himself betrayed a curious reticence on the topic. In
The Tears ef Eros, Part One of which is devoted to prehistory, he
carefully and pointedly summarizes his previous statements about
the images in the pit at Lascaux. In reference to his 1955 mono-
graph, he confesses: "I forbade myself from giving a personal
interpretation of this surprising scene. I restricted myself to re-
laying the interpretation of a German anthropologist." 5 Of his
1957 interpretation of the scene, given in Erotism, he is similarly
critical, claiming that his interpretation was "excessively cautious
... I limited myself."6 Bataille couches his self-criticism in star-
tling terms: of restriction, limitation, and forbidden speech. He
faults himself for failing to offer a "personal interpretation,"
though he is the writer who claimed in Guilty, "Nothing is more
foreign to me than a personal mode of thought .... If I utter a
word I bring into play the thought of other people:•1 Bataille
laments forbidding himself a speech that he nevertheless denies.
It is a paradox, then, as so often in Bataille: at once the nearly
obsessive will to know, to speak on a particular topic, and the
refusal to do so, the refusal to offer a definitive interpretation, to
close the topic once and for all. Reading this diverse corpus of
essays, lectures, and reviews, of writings in philosophical anthro-
pology and aesthetics, in the history of religions and sociology of
the festival, one may feel as though Bataille were interminably,

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA