EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

eternally, circling the topic at hand, circling the scene in question,

often the scene in the pit at Lascaux, without satisfying his own
and our own desire for answers, as though he were deferring the
definitive statement: speaking while waiting to speak.

Although Bataille began writing on prehistory in 1930 as part of

the general corrosion of contemporary visual culture that he
effected through the journal Documents, cave painting did not sur­
face as a vehicle of his primary concerns until the early 1950s. 8
The moment of his turning to Lascaux is an interesting one. In
1949, Bataille published the first volume of a projected trilogy,
The Accursed Share.9 A year later, in 1950 and continuing in 1951,
he drafted the trilogy's second volume, The History of Eroticism. 10
Dissatisfied with the text, he put it aside for three years, then
rewrote it in 1954 and 1955 before finally publishing it under the
title Erotism. Perhaps most significant among the differences be­
tween the two versions of the work is the turn to prehistory.
In The History of Eroticism, Bataille couches his discussion of the
passage from animal to man in pointedly abstract, philosophical,
and logical terms. In Erotism, on the other hand, the passage is a
properly historical one, a passage located in prehistory and visi­
ble, for Bataille, in the drama surrounding the creation of works
of art.
Bataille's preference for philosophical over anthropological
discourse in The History of Eroticism repeats the logic of his 1948
lecture on the history of religions. In that lecture, he tells his
listeners: "In order to represent this outline [of the history of reli­
gions], I begin with animality.... I will represent forms succes­
sively in my presentation without precise concern for responding
to a given historical succession. It is not a question, in the group
of forms analyzed, of a succession that one could give as chrono­
logical, it is a question of logical succession that might coincide

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