1. Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006
https://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/bataille.html
Jeremy Bell
Trent University in Peterborough, Canada
Bataille, Georges. Edited and Introduced by Stuart Kendall. Translated by Michelle Kendall.
The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture. London. The MIT Press. 210 pages.
ISBN: 1-890951-55-2. £18.95 hardback.
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For readers who have not comprehended the nuances of Georges Bataille’s fascination with
prehistoric art, and the role it plays in his conception of the erotic, this new collection of
translations by Stuart and Michelle Kendall entitled The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art
and Culture is a vital addition to one’s library. Collected here in English is Georges Bataille’s
various writings on prehistoric art and culture not published already in The Birth of Art,
Eroticism, or The Tears of Eros. These eleven pieces together comprise Bataille’s reflections on
the passage from animal to man. Here, Bataille explores prehistoric art and culture, and
examines the equivocal relationship between man and animal, and how it is this influences our
meaning of the sacred.
In his introduction to this collection, Stuart Kendall traces the importance of prehistoric art for
Bataille, commenting upon Bataille’s ongoing efforts to simultaneously straddle various
discourses. Kendall outlines as well the inherent tensions in Bataille’s thinking between
dialectics and the Marquis de Sade. By noting the importance of Sade for Bataille, Kendall
observes how the passage from animal to man is predicated upon an impossible identification
with the animal within, and how this is emphasized in Bataille’s insistence upon the effacement
of man confronted with the animal world.
As Kendall also observes in his introduction, the timeliness of Bataille’s analysis of prehistoric
art is evident in his brief but crisp comments upon Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and how it is that
knowledge of our origins seemed to occur for Bataille precisely at the moment coinciding with
the possibility of our extinction. More obliquely, Bataille comments upon the role 20th
Century
aesthetics, and particularly Picasso, play in our ability to be moved by these childish but
necessarily figural drawings and sculptures. Perhaps more than any other element though, these
collected writings indicate to the reader Bataille’s tremendous regard for his contemporaries
examining prehistoric art, foremost amongst being Henri Breuil.

2. The first and earliest document presented in The Cradle of Humanity, entitled “Primitive Art”
presents a review of Georges-Henri Luquet’s book L’ Art primitif. Here Bataille retraces
Luquet’s “genesis of figurative art,” wherein the art of young children is contrasted with
prehistoric art. He examines how figuration occurs as formless sets of lines crisscrossing, which
develop slowly into form. For both children and the earliest examples of prehistoric art,
according to Bataille and Luquet, this early stage of figuration occurs as a destructive dragging
of fingers across otherwise untouched surfaces. Additionally, Bataille presents the reader with
some autobiographical anecdotes and samples of graffiti taken from of Abyssinian children, in
order to put forward his own theory on the advent of figuration.
In his review of Dr. Leo Frobenius’ exhibit of South African or Bushman mural paintings at the
Salle Pleyel, he prosaically observes how, upon visiting the exhibit, the hall was virtually empty.
Nonetheless, for Bataille these images are even more remarkable than European examples of
prehistoric art. Here, the negation of man in the face of nature is so persistent that man appears
in these paintings as a blatant heterogeneity, a separation of inconceivable violence and waste.
In his lecture entitled “A Visit to Lascaux,” Bataille explores the relationship between animals
and primitive humanity, observing how—for primitive hunters—animals are not yet things.
Here, he calls upon the sensibilities of hunters to observe how, for the hunter, there is a sense of
nobility in the hunted animal, and the act of killing carries no sense of hatred toward the animals.
According to Bataille, the proximity of these hunters to animals extends so that man is man
represented only in relation to animals, one reason perhaps why the only human image in
Lascaux is adorned with a bird’s face.
The longest essay in The Cradle of Humanity, from which the title of this collection draws its
name, was unpublished in Bataille’s lifetime. In questioning the Vézère valley civilization,
Bataille observes our coming into the world as such. Here, Bataille identifies two moments, the
first being the extended incubation of the second, which he tells us, occurred discreetly but
which nonetheless constitutes our birth as such. This consisted of arrival of Upper Paleolithic
man into the Vézère valley. For Bataille, the arrival of this more developed human, the first our
ancestors to engage in art, set the path for all human civilization to come. In this essay, the most
thorough of his inquiries within this collection, Bataille observes the role death plays in our
evolution of the sacred, and how this was prefaced upon the divine nature of animality.
Additionally, The Cradle of Humanity offers the reader a review of Henri Breuil’s Four Hundred
Centuries of Cave Art entitled “The Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art.” The
reader also finds a long essay entitled “Prehistoric Religion,” wherein he inquires into the
meaning bear cults in prehistory, and “The Lespugue Venus” which explores the potential
meaning of the erotic for prehistoric humanity. As well, one is presented with his January 18th
,
1955 lecture on Lascaux, which predated the publication of The Birth of Art by three months.
Whether or not the reader is moved by Georges Bataille’s explorations within the introduction to
The Tears of Eros or Lascaux, these new translations by Stuart and Michelle Kendall are vital
additions to anyone interested in exploring the complexities of a thinker exploring, what Stuart
Kendall calls in his introduction, the sediments of the possible.
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3. Jeremy Bell is currently pursuing his MA at the Center for Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent
University in Peterborough, Canada. His current research interests concern Georges Bataille, the
meaning of the economic and the advent of figuration.