Bataille’s Prehistoric Turn: The Case for Heterology

Introduction

Heterology’s critics dismiss it as a relatively short-lived contribution to the Bataillian oeuvre. They concur that despite its claims to redress deficiencies in philosophy and the social sciences, the study of the wholly other would reverse definitions of its labile homogeneous/heterogeneous dualism in the span of a decade (Libertson, 1974: 680–1), abandon ambitions for a theoretical work on fascism (Hill, 2001: 80–1), or find its definitive formulation in the College of Sociology (1937–9) (Galletti, 2018). None of these readings, however, accounts for the resurgence of heterology’s tout autre as a viable explanatory criterion in Bataille’s late writings on prehistory. Clustered primarily between the 1955 publication of his book on the Lascaux cave and his death in 1962, Bataille’s corpus on prehistory dates to a 1930 review article on primitive art contemporaneous with the unpublished manuscript on heterology we have been invited to consider. Neither the criticism concentrated on the Lascaux book (Ungar, 1990; Guerlac, 1996; Noland, 2004; Monod, 2006; White, 2009) nor the robust attention garnered by his work in the field of animal studies (Buchanan, 2011; Chrulew, 2011; Arnould-Bloomfield, 2012; Balazut, 2012) has adopted a global view of prehistory in Bataille’s work. Stuart Kendall’s introduction to his translated anthology of Bataille’s writings on prehistory signaled the lacuna (Kendall, 2009). Unexamined is the significance of this dimension of Bataille’s thinking for specialists as well as for the broader intellectual community willing to plunge into what scholars now describe as deep history (Shryock and Smail, 2009).

The present study argues that the case for heterology in relation to prehistory is threefold. First, it claims that the reappearance among Bataille’s final writings of heterology’s key term, tout autre, extends heterology’s timeline to his entire career. ¹ Second, it argues that heterology’s innovation was to enlist the criterion of the wholly other to identify a recurrent psychological and social structure of division and exclusion. The term derived from Rudolph Otto’s 1917 milestone study of the sacred conveys the extraordinary nature of certain religious experiences, ranging from daemonic fears to the mysterium of awe and ecstasy. But a striking passage in ‘The Definition of Heterology’ exhorts heterology to expose the pernicious process that pits humans against each other while endowing a favored few with irrational appeal:

Heterology retains only the process of separation of men [sic] and groups of men, human unity shattered like glass, making one man for another no longer a brother, whether in abundance or misery, but something entirely other, a being absolutely foreign, so that he can only provoke either the feelings of repulsion and nausea, or hypnotic attraction. This terrible process of division, striking humankind like a terrible curse, is even clearer in India than in other countries, mainly because of religious ossification. (Bataille, 2018; translation modified)

The detour into fascism highlights the ambivalence inherent to the term ‘wholly other’. It also explains why Bataille would enlist it to convey the analogous reception of prehistory, given that admiration for the artistic achievements of hominid ancestors did not deter their exclusion from Western history’s traditional narrative (Shryock and Smail, 2011: x). The 1859 unearthing of a bi-face tool in Amiens, France, rendered prehistory visible through a newly constituted archaeological record (Schnapp, 1997). When Bataille published his first article on prehistoric art in 1930, an impressive array of Neanderthal burial sites as well as portable art, sculpture, tools and wall painting had already been inventoried, capable of furnishing a substantive counterweight to the claim that history begins only with written documents.

Thus, the second case for heterology underscores Bataille’s challenge to the marginalization of prehistory by insisting on the radical possibilities of communication through silence. This preference dovetails with a modernist aesthetics of silence forged with his close friend and interlocutor, Maurice Blanchot. Bataille claims that his admiration for the silence of animals is shared with the prehistoric artists as well, who convey the animals’ indifference to human reliance on words and things for communication. Among his most daring assertions, human language is posited as a disruption of the continuum that distinguishes the animal realm. Lost in the transition to becoming human, its violent and sovereign silence must be recovered through a detour into prehistoric civilization. In a brief section of The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto had also turned to silence as one of the indirect means for representing the numinous available to art. Despite impressive efforts to transmit the quality of total otherness, including his own, he conceded that it ‘evades precise formulation in words, and we have to employ symbolic phrases which seem sometimes sheer paradox, that is, irrational, not merely non-rational, in import’ (1950: 59). Otto then traced the historical genesis of religious silence to ‘the fear of using words of evil omen’ (1950: 68), just as the prophets and psalms exalted the moment of silence as a spontaneous reaction to the presence of the numen. In contrast with all these examples – where silence is ultimately consecrated according to the criteria of the right pole of the sacred – Bataille’s innovation would be to couple silence with a violent moment of sovereign revolt.

The third and final case made for heterology will be to correlate the totally other with Bataille’s predilection for interruption. Whereas some critics dismiss Bataille’s interruptions as a sign of shortcomings (Hollier, 1993; Hill, 2001; Rabaté, 2006), or in contradiction with the textual goal of continuity (Santi, 2007), they will be examined here as a technique for recapturing the continuum archaic humans sacrificed when they invented work, language, and a temporality subordinated to the future. With a focus on silence as exemplar of hetero-logical interruption, the topics covered reprise the impact of prehistory on Bataille’s final research agenda, including religious experience, markings, eroticism, and the rupture between animals and humans.

Shock of the Old

Ambivalent modernist that he was, Bataille would embrace archaic civilization to fuel his antipathy to bourgeois humanism and its foundations in metaphysical idealism. The radical de-centering of the human subject effected by Marx and Freud pale in comparison with the impact of African rock art, whose stupefying negation of man (Bataille, 2009: 46) points to an irreversible rupture between humans and nature. With its demotion of mankind to the ‘waste’ of nature, this proclamation of a base materialism is especially noteworthy. Viewing humanity as a heterogeneous ejection was intended as a fatal blow to Aristotelian mimetic theories of art:

Far from seeking to affirm humanity against nature, man, born of nature, here voluntarily appears as a kind of waste … The blatant heterogeneity of our being in relation to the world that gave birth to it … seems to have been for those among us who have lived in nature, the basis of all representation. (Bataille, 2009: 46)

Violent silence is instructive for the fate of heterology because it required the constructed nature of a discipline modeled after ethnography. Durkheim’s 1895 shift to the basis for social cohesion in the opposition between the sacred and the profane had prompted French sociology to adopt an ethnographically-based comparative methodology. The sociologists were thus able to distinguish their nascent discipline from the ‘simplistic and naively politicized, unconsciously abstract and nationalistic’ (Mauss, 1974: 474) study of history that had proven so influential in the reactionary post-1789 French academy. By enlisting ethnographic evidence in the service of sociological laws or generalizations, the detour would foster a self-reflexive dimension whose goal was to address, if not totally resolve, challenges posed by a methodology aiming to be at once subjective and objective. ²

Roger Caillois’s 1939 lecture on the demise of the festival offers a case in point. The eclipse of public expenditure in massive festivals would hardly constitute a revelation to fellow collegians. More arresting was his explanation for their virtual disappearance. Due to a flattening of extremes, ‘the social organism is less tolerant of interruption of the ordinary course of life’ (Bataille, 1988: 301–2; emphasis added). That same year, Bataille’s experimentation with various ‘techniques of illumination’ provides a record of his subjective experience of the contracted sacred/profane cycle. ³ Before him, Marcel Mauss, author of the ur-study (1905–6) of the ‘grand seasonal rhythm of alternations’ practiced by the Inuit Eskimos, noted that their pattern was far from unique and speculated that their contrasting modalities between the sacred and the profane might occur within a month, week, or even a day (Mauss, 1950: 474). Bataille would complete the list by adding the instant. No less urgent or violent than its ethnographic forebears, transgression of the profane was now reduced to the instant of sacred communication. According to his 1939 key article, the sacred was described as ‘a privileged moment of communal unity, of convulsive communication of that which is ordinarily suffocated’ (OC I, 1970: 563). Eschewing the models of yoga or Christian mystics, his method of meditation tested withdrawal and suspension, but ultimately settled on interruption. Modern humans may find the festival’s interruption of profane existence intolerable. Yet they would become a hallmark of Bataille’s new economy of writing, thereby testing readers and critics, as well as the limits of narrative itself. ⁴ Erotic or poetic élans, cries, spit, tears, or laughter constitute a paradigm. When projected onto the syntagmatic axis, their disruptions induce communication in the major sense of restoring the continuum interrupted by work and language. Among hetero-logical elements, silence would become an object of desire, wrested from discourse by the force of the writer’s words.

Hidden for over 19,000 years, the Lascaux cave was explored in 1940. At Bataille’s urging, the Skira series published his commissioned study in 1955 devoted exclusively to it. Claiming that the extraordinary accomplishments of the Upper Paleolithic humans heralded triumphs to follow, the Lascaux study rejected the comparative approach that had been a legacy of the French school of social anthropology. The fossilized societies of ethnography, he argued, could not serve the pre-historian (OC IX: 27). The new data would spur a fresh appraisal of modernity. To that end, the following section considers Bataille’s contribution to the modernist aesthetics of silence as inseparable from his foray into what scholars now describe as deep history (Shryock and Smail, 2011).

Silence in the Lascaux Cave

Bataille’s final writings proclaimed that sovereign silence was instantiated by the majestic animals encountered on the Lascaux walls. A ‘shocking duality’ (Bataille, 2009: 40) between them and stick-figure humans is found throughout art of the Upper Paleolithic. The disparity is a reminder of animal freedom from work, prohibitions, and what Maurice Blanchot described as the machine of language. Both writers extolled joy in the face of death resulting from their experiences of silence. To the question of why write when faced with the temptation of silence, they turned to the archaic past as an alternative to the limitations of modern humanity. Both questioned how words could interrupt speech in order to access continuity, totality, and sovereignty of being without assuming the naïve position that the mere absence of speech would do so. Aware that silence constitutes a provocation to the very existence of language, and in that sense, a crime, Bataille asserted: ‘Crime first of all against language, in relation to which the writer who elects silence as his object behaves like the incestuous one against the law, crime also against silence itself’ (OC XII, 1988: 175). The crime against silence referred to here stems from the fact of positing it as an object, thereby restricting knowledge of silence to an external point of view. At the risk of reducing his goal to overcoming the simple and apparently simplistic antinomies that favor objective knowledge over subjective experience, or the intelligible over the sensible, Bataille nonetheless continually denounced them as impediments to the communication of experiences that necessitate a point of view from within. Otto’s caveat that ‘Not even music, which can give manifold expression to all the feelings of the mind, has any positive way to express “the holy”’ (Otto, 1950: 70, emphasis added), would echo in Bataille’s thinking. Because ‘One can have the experience of the sacred. But we cannot provide a positive description of it’ (OC XII, 1998: 495), the sacred, like religion, can only be broached by means of a detour.

To abjure language for silence is scandalous outside of the convent or monastery, so the writer is directed to a more dynamic alternative to the opposition between word and silence – the process of silencing discourse: ‘If we live without contestation under the law of language these moments [of sovereignty] are in us as if they did not exist. But if, contrary to this law, we can seize one of these states and halt their passage by silencing discourse in ourselves, we can then attend to the surprise they provide us’ (OC V, 1973: 27, emphasis added). Acknowledging that it is virtually impossible to entirely silence oneself, Bataille observed that the frequently cruel struggles to do so are compensated by states of delirious ravishment. The eroticized, trance-like description is consistent with the model of desire that informs his work, especially evident in the techniques relating to the experience and communication of sovereign silence. In a relatively obscure essay entitled ‘Beyond Seriousness’, for instance, he set out to speak of happiness by echoing an earlier review of Blanchot that described how their shared joy in the face of death was the outcome of a collusion with silence, disrupted by a return to the unhappiness of speech. Silence, like death – and the equation between the two is a commonplace in their works – had become the ultimate desideratum in this moment of literary modernism.

In contrast with the divisive process decried in the early text on heterology, the prehistoric turn furnished an alternative parsing of the human record. Its counter-history envisages the interruption of conventional narratives by instants of sovereign revolt (Richman, 2007). At stake is the possibility for a continuity re-imagined through the sensible traces – informe doodling and irrepressible markings – that animals as well as earliest humans left in their wake. Equally telling, burial sites where tools and bones are juxtaposed can catapult contemporary observers to the earliest expression of anguish in relation to death. From its privileged vantage, the prehistoric detour provides the conditions of possibility to simulate a continuum according to the following revised notions: communication before speech, the religious before religion, wisdom before philosophy, markings before art, eroticism before sexuality, and globally, what Jean-Luc Nancy summarized as humans before humanism. ⁵ Before connotes priority and valorization as well as chronological anteriority.

Communication before Speech: Headless Figures

This section juxtaposes two icons of sovereign silence: one, the celebrated prehistoric statue of a headless bear from the Montespan cave. Dating from 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, it is considered the oldest human clay sculpture on record. The other is the a-cephalic figure Bataille urged from André Masson’s pen in 1936, where a skull replaced genitals, a labyrinth the bowels, a sacred heart is placed in the right hand and a metal lance in the left. ⁶ It is not obvious which figure has aroused greater controversy, since both reveal the perils of silence leading to sovereignty. The headless bear predictably generated heated polemics around the question of whether its head was simply missing or had never been there, despite the fact that the Comte Begouën, on whose property it was found in 1923, unequivocally asserted that the figure was acephalic ‘and it is certain that it always has been’ (Begouën, 1923: 5–6). Details in support of his position include the fact that ‘the severed edge of the neck is smooth and polished like the rest of the body; it is neither broken nor damaged. But toward the middle, one can see a triangular hole, as though there had been an intention to install a peg to hang something on’ (1923: 5–6). Begouën assumed that his hypothesis was confirmed by the bear skull found on the floor between the statue’s forepaws at the time of the initial discovery. But he reported that it was stolen a few days later. A precedent for interpretations was also set when he noted that the 30 deep holes inflicted on the animal’s body attested to its centrality during ceremonial rituals. They confirm, he continued, ‘the theory of magical trances during prehistoric rituals, responsible for the presence of wounds and arrows or clubs on the cave’s walls’ (1923: 10).

Michel Pastoureau, historian of the bear and a medievalist by training, paraphrased the more or less accepted view among pre-historians that this statue allows the contemporary observer to imagine, if not to reconstitute, religious rituals connected to hunting. Arguing against the utilitarian or magical readings of bear lore, Bataille had meticulously pointed out that legends of retaliation indicate that the animal was first captured and then killed. This seemingly minor detail is controversial because it implies that ritual sacrifice would have been practiced prior to agricultural settlements, thus pushing back the date of a practice he deemed of paramount significance.

Bataille’s substantive reflections on the Montespan bear contrast with his silence regarding the significance of the a-cephalic creature in his own history. At stake is recognition for non-knowledge or the corollary to sovereign silence, according to the message of the a-cephalic figure he summarized this way: ‘Human life has reached its limit of serving as head and reason for the universe. […] Man escapes from his head the way the prisoner escapes from jail. He has found beyond himself not God who forbids crime, but a being who ignores the prohibition’ (OC I, 1970: 445). Relinquishing all modes of mastery, the headless icon was featured on the cover of the review Acéphale while consecrating the possibility for a sovereign community by the same name. Few episodes from the turbulent interwar history of the French avant-garde have garnered notoriety comparable to that associated with this group. Rumors circulated that a human sacrifice would be committed according to Bataille’s directives. More significant is that none of the efforts to breach the group’s sacred conspiracy of silence was successful. Seven years after Acéphale disbanded, Bataille would assert that communication relies on bonds of silence, a willed silence. His coda is a reminder that ‘inner experience cannot be communicated if the bonds of silence … do not change those it puts into play’ (OC V, 1973: 42).

Admiration for the power of willed silence would be reinforced by an ethnographic detour into Siberian legends. Contracting thousands of years of bear cults and rituals, Yukaghir hunters recounted to 19th-century ethnographers that ‘the bear could speak if he wanted, but he prefers not to and they see this silence as proof of the bear’s superiority over man’ (Bataille, 2009: 163; emphasis added). On several occasions, Batalle endorsed the will to silence as a sign of superiority, thereby raising the question of why silence appears so scandalous for modernity. One explanation is that extreme silence exacts the sacrifice of language identified with reason, and reason is perceived as an antidote to violence: ‘Silence is the unlimited violation of the interdiction that human reason opposed to violence’ (OC XII, 1988: 483). In his otherwise severely critical review of Inner Experience, Jean-Paul Sartre was surprisingly receptive to Bataille’s promotion of silence in modern literature. William Marx speculated that Sartre’s reaction may have been prepared by Martin Heidegger’s judgment of the authenticity of silence over speech: ‘Only he who knows how to speak is silent’ (Marx, 2005: 146). ⁷ The resurgence of headless icons would militate against the sovereign individual(ism) constructed by the ideologies of economic rationality and political liberalism. In its place emerges a silent figure whose refusal to submit to the telos of modernity is emblematized by a missing head.

The Religious before Religion

Bataille’s detour through the Paleolithic entailed a convoluted effort to distinguish between the French noun, le religieux, and the more familiar la religion. What appealed to him is that material traces from earliest humanity would bridge the temporal divide, even if definitive claims for a history of inner life remain elusive. Just as it was criminal to posit silence as an object, so it is ultimately self-defeating for religion or studies of religion to claim that they provide a positive description of what it means to be religious in this very broad anthropological sense. Bataille’s negative theology found reinforcement in archaeological evidence that earliest humanity reacted to the mystery of death and its attendant anguish by means of rituals that can be interpreted as sacred because, ‘The sacred is a return to the silence of death, and the silence of death always remains sacred’ (OC XII, 1988: 32). It is noteworthy that Bataille introduced the controversial bear cult as among the oldest evidence of le religieux. At the epicenter of contemporary polemics is whether the bear’s special status elevated it to the rank of a god. If so, that would confirm the religious capacity of earliest humans. ⁸ Equally contentious is the significance of Neanderthal burial sites. The 1908 discovery of one at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, followed shortly by another at La Ferrassie, confirmed for Bataille the intentional recognition of death by these hominin ancestors. Arguably more affecting than the technically superb cave drawings, their rudimentary burial pits carved into the earth, where human skeletons were carefully placed in an east/west axis along with tools and animal bones, elicit the sense of what is meant by tout autre:

In this world where man saw no distinction between himself and animals, death opened a terrifyingly threatening space. … From the very beginning, death had introduced the beyond of human life. … In other words, if the animal world was divine, it was so projected onto the unreal domain of death: religious thought has always engaged in the contemplation of a world entirely other from that of human life. It is always a question of this terrified feeling that death inspires in man. But the animal is, in every sense, on a par with death. The animal is the being that the hunter only saw in order to kill, in the killing of the divine animal, the hunter overcame the terror of death. (Bataille, 2009: 164, 165–6, emphasis in text)

Markings before Art

An early reference to Aurignacian art appeared in Bataille’s 1930 review article of Alfred Luquet’s L’Art primitif. ¹⁰ Luquet’s speculations on the origins of figurative art equated the drawings of early modern humans, children, and contemporary tribal peoples. Despite the paucity of Luquet’s prehistoric examples, Bataille extrapolated from them his subsequently influential theory of the informe. Luquet’s narrow corpus, skewed toward the practice of superimposition among cave drawings, was consistent with his study’s focus on art heterogeneous to the classical canon. Unlike the iconic realism of the Altamira cave paintings, the prehistoric palimpsests offered a dizzying puzzle of imbricated figures overlapping and intruding within a shared space. Their disregard for spatial conventions sparked Bataille’s associations with his own aggressive, libidinal childhood impulse to dabble with ink on the pupil in front of him, while reminding readers that humans may have been motivated to make their own markings on cave walls after observing the scratches made by bears.

Following publication of the Lascaux book, Bataille revised his earlier interpretations, especially of the enigmatic shaft scene. Its location in a long, narrow opening in the cave floor of the majestic hallway of bulls, accessible formerly by rope, and large enough to accommodate only three or four humans at a time, immediately qualifies for heterological standing. Bataille referred to the shaft as Le Saint des Saints in keeping with the terminology taken up by Ferdinand Windels, who compared the major grotto to the Sistine Chapel and each part of the cave complex to those of a cathedral. The shaft scene depicts a magnificent wounded bison, which Bataille describes as enraged, emptying its entrails. ¹¹ Nearby hovers the closest approximation to a human encountered among the animals: the floating stick figure with a bird-head and erect penis is assumed to be dead. Bataille singled out the bird-head as emblematic of the superior capacity of animals to face death, in contrast with the submissiveness or indifference of modern humans: ‘What Lascaux man discovered in the convulsive obscurity of the animal world, far from the reactions of modern man, who opposes the indifference of reason to death, is that grandeur is linked to the fact of being suspended, hung over the abyss of death, yet full of virile force’ (Bataille, 2009: 173).

The very final piece on the shaft scene in Les Larmes d’Eros (1961) stresses its staged encounter between death and sexuality, a visual reminder that the French phrase for orgasm is la petite mort. The paleo-anthropologist and painted cave specialist David Lewis-Williams concurs with the Bataillian critique that western civilization is exceptional in its fixation on genital sexuality to the detriment of a more capacious appreciation of the place of death in eroticism (2002: 265). Bataille also dissented from the prevailing view that the exaggerated reproductive organs of female figurines were linked to fertility. Instead, he interprets them as a sign of humanity’s break with animals, because only humans express ambivalence toward their own genitalia, whether through tears or laughter (1989: 33).

Wisdom before Knowledge

The image of Wisdom refers to René Char’s poem The Unnameable Beast, inspired by a Lascaux frieze. Char compares a beast with tears in its eyes to a comic Cyclops and the Beast that ‘belches devoutly in the country air’ is an allegorical figure of Wisdom. Its tears signal that the disguised Mother/Muse is about to deliver her pendulous loins during a painful process (Char, 1992: 83). Blanchot’s gloss offers a meditation on the silence of Lascaux and the wisdom of archaic humanity prior to the epistemological split of philosophy from the discourse of the ancient poets, an evocative moment of the silence from which all poetic expression struggles to emerge (2002: 63). Within the community constituted through the intertextual relations of Blanchot, Char, and Bataille to prehistory, the latter was especially troubled by modern humanism’s interruption of communication between animals and humans. Ice-Age art suggested a very different relation to animals than the one fuelled by subsequent biases and assumptions:

These primitive beings did not believe themselves superior to the animals: themselves being hardly separated from animality, having only an obscure consciousness of their humanity. In these animals that they hunted dangerously, they suspected, dreaded, the redoubtable forces, probably divine, of ‘spirits.’ Whereas we see, at best, inferior brothers, they discerned mysterious forces. (Bataille, 2009: 195)

Bataillian anthropology never questioned the need for reason and work to transition from the condition of animal to human. Yet the recurrence of semi-human icons throughout his work, such as the Minotaur, suggests otherwise. Decades of research dating from the 1930 illustration of a Gnostic stone stamp in Documents –‘God with the legs of a man, the body of a snake and the head of a cock’ (OC I, 1970: 226) – appear motivated by Bataille’s obsession with his own animality. ¹² It is arguably in a prehistoric cave that he found the composite figure capable of assuaging his torment – the ‘Horned God’ of the Trois-Frères cave, whose masked face contrasts with exaggerated genitals. A late meditation on the animal side of man provides an added stratum to the archaeology of tout autre:

The animal side of a man has something strange about it. It places man in a beyond, above the human order. Something wild and violent is liberated when man assumes the form of a beast; something vague and troubling enters into the composition with the sense of the divine. This is no longer tangible for us in the same way it was for the ancients, yet those among us familiar with the history of religions cannot misunderstand the fundamental nature of this violent feeling. (Bataille, 2009: 165)

Conclusion: Heterology between Science and Scandal

Bataille’s turn to prehistory proved essential to the revitalization of heterology. Archaic art and artifacts injected a new dynamism into what critics had dismissed as a moribund way of thinking. The explanation proposed above is that juxtapositions between death and the erotic, a concentration on animals to the detriment of humans, Neanderthal burial sites, violent silence, and headless or hybrid figures would fuel his aspiration for the continuum sundered by the transition from animals to humans. Continuity must be understood as a vector of resistance to the terrible process of division denounced in the manuscript on heterology guiding this inquiry. Bataille’s method for arriving at an intimation of otherwise repressed continuity is a detour, and the prehistoric turn examined here was guided by the earliest traces of archaic beings. He claimed to see in their drawings the lost continuum between humans and animals disrupted when mankind submitted, among other interdictions, to the law of language. Sovereign silence is a willed silence, whose source in legends proclaimed animal superiority. Violent silence calls on modern humans to retrieve a sense of continuity through interruptions of everyday life. ¹³

Navigating between scandal and science, Bataille’s thought always courted controversy, and the manuscript on heterology is no exception. A plausible explanation for its unpublished status would be his wariness following the termination of his editorial position for the review Documents. Between 1929 and 1930, the eclectic journal documented eruptions of scatology, eroticism, and death in a global array of mediums from prehistory to the present. It also insisted that scholarship be liberated from elitist enclaves for the benefit of a general public. This impetus is clearly at work in Bataille’s mobilization of prehistoric evidence that would be an irritation to assumptions informing scholarship spanning religious studies to art history. ¹⁴ Heterology alone would document the sources of religion in the muck of human waste formerly associated with the origins of life, an equation between excrement and infants subsumed under the sacred, but subsequently segregated into the profane. Examples of maternal or paternal cannibalism, erotic vampirism, and his own necrophilia reinforce continuity among humans.

Scholarship pertaining to prehistory is equally contentious ¹⁵ and Bataille’s contributions have elicited mixed reactions (Cohen, 2003; Eshleman, 2003; Pasztory, 2005). Exposure to cave painting did not spur the same efflorescence of aesthetic innovations that followed European contact with the arts of Oceania and Africa (Cardinal, 2004). In 1879, the spectacular polychrome paintings on the cave ceiling in Altamira, Spain, were met with skepticism. Even the avant-garde was divided: Picasso’s encomium – ‘We have not done anything better’ ¹⁶ – contrasts with André Breton’s scandalous challenge to Ice-Age art’s authenticity in 1952, when he brushed his hand against the walls of a cave (OC IX: 424, n.3). Prehistory was not featured extensively in Documents. Nor did French sociology study it. ¹⁷ It remained the bailiwick of informed and committed amateurs until the official professionalization of the field by the Vichy government in 1941 (Hurel, 2007). That Bataille persevered in this intellectual minefield should burnish his reputation as a heterological thinker. The goal of this overview was to garner recognition for his contributions to the belated writing of a deep history that would not be initiated until the 21st century. ¹⁸