The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture (Mit Press) - Softcover

Bataille, Georges

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890951560 ISBN 13: 9781890951566

Publisher: Zone Books, 2009

Synopsis

A radically interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins of human consciousness, community, and potential.

The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture collects essays and lectures by Georges Bataille spanning 30 years of research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle nor idyllic years; the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the bloodiest war in history―with new machines of death, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. Bataille's reflections on the possible origins of humanity coincide with the intensified threat of its possible extinction. For Bataille, prehistory is universal history; it is the history of a human community prior to its fall into separation, into nations and races. The art of prehistory offers the earliest traces of nascent yet fully human consciousness―of consciousness not yet fully separated from natural flora and fauna, or from the energetic forces of the universe. A play of identities, the art of prehistory is the art of a consciousness struggling against itself, of a human spirit struggling against brute animal physicality. Prehistory is the cradle of humanity, the birth of tragedy. Bataille reaches beyond disciplinary specializations to imagine a moment when thought was universal. Bataille's work provides a model for interdisciplinary inquiry in our own day, a universal imagination and thought for our own potential community. The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture speaks to philosophers and historians of thought, to anthropologists interested in the history of their discipline and in new methodologies, to theologians and religious comparatists interested in the origins and nature of man's encounter with the sacred, and to art historians and aestheticians grappling with the place of prehistory in the canons of art.

About this title

About the Author

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French writer, essayist, and philosopher whose works include The Story of the Eye, The Blue of Noon, The Accursed Share, and Theory of Religion.

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of the filthy modernist masterpiece The Story of The Eye may be surprised when they encounter Bataille (1897-1962) in an almost academic mode-but, if so, they are forgetting that Bataille was the founder of the journal Critique, that he was a librarian specializing in Medievalism at Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale and that all that transformed primitivism had to come from somewhere. This book may not have much value as archeology or even as criticism, but it's terrific as a kind of poetics of prehistory. On animals: "we get along with one another in order to eliminate death, to rid it from our horizon, to create an end in the world in which it would be as if the animal's agony and death were nonexistent." Drawing on the cave paintings of Lascaux, the Lespugue Venus and many other works, Bataille articulates a world that is simultaneously ours and unrecoverable, where those who kill their prey ask it "to forgive them for killing it, and sometimes they cry for it, in a touching mixture of distracted sincerity and simple playacting."
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Edition details

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1890951560
• ISBN 13: 9781890951566
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Kendall Stuart