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    Go Gle: The Tears Eros

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    Go Gle: The Tears Eros

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    Go Gle: The Tears Eros

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    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,

    10

    Digitized by Google Original from


    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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