EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

to Prehistoric Paintin9, he acknowledges his "heavy indebtedness"

to the specialists in prehistory, like Breuil, and writes: "With
regard to archeological data, I have simply used what prehistorians
have established at the price of an immense labor that has always
called for patience - and often for genius:'44 In the texts collected
here as well, his thought advances in conversation with the spe­
cialists in the field. He reviews their writings in Critiqu e and relies
on them, even as he attempts to push his own thought beyond
what these specialists have been able to say about the caves.
In addition, the theories of sympathetic and contagious magic
remain distinctly appealing to Bataille, not only as modes of de­
scription but also as modes of social action. For Bataille, the cos­
mos itself could be described in terms of energies, which he viewed
as contagious. He also saw his own writing as a form of contagion:
"At the moment when you read me, the contagion of my fever
reaches you ...words, books, monuments, symbols, laughter are
only so many paths of this contagion, of this passage:'45
Magic, then, contagion, but also some�ing else is at stake in
the caves. After his initial refusal to speak on the topic - his re­
course to the simple repetition of an anthropologist's interpreta­
tion in Prehistoric Paintin9 - Bataille broke his silence and inter­
preted the scene as one of murder (the hunt is nevertheless murder)
and expiation: a "shaman [is] expiating, through his own death, the
murder of the bison. Expiation for the murder of animals killed in
the hunt is a rule for many tribes of hunters:'46 He explains: "The
act of killing invested the killer, hunter, or warrior with a sacra­
mental character. In order to take their place once more in pro­
fane society, they had to be cleansed and purified, and this was the
object of expiatory rituals:'47
Several key elements of this interpretation stand out: the man
is a shaman, perhaps wearing a bird mask; the scene recapitulates
a scene of the hunt but in a sacrificial register; and the shaman

21