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1 It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation . In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Among the hundreds of images on the walls of the Lascaux cave, mostly of horses and aurochs, but also including stags, ibex, and bison, only one depicts a human figure. For Georges Bataille (2005), this figure, with its bird head and its animal associate, located in the deep shaft of the cave’s apse, its “Holiest of Holies”1 held a special importance. The gutted bison, naturalistically rendered, pierced by a spear and with its intestines unraveling, faces this apparently dead but ithyphallic man. Unlike the bison and the cave’s many other animal representations, all so skillfully depicted, this human figure is only roughly sketched, but his cultural importance, then and now, is no less significant for that. For Bataille, this image, above all others in Lascaux, encapsulates the moment of humanity’s inception, of our becoming recognizably human. Thisisnotatalltosaythatthis“mostancientart”(Bataille2005,103) is empirically the earliest example of what might be taken as a defining capacity to produce representational art. (The Lascaux paintings, composed over an extended period between fifteen and seventeen thousand years ago, are in any case now deemed relatively recent in comparison 1 AWAKENING 2 awakening with, for example, those discovered at Chauvet in 1994.) Rather, for Bataille, this particular artistic representation provides an exemplary expression and illustration of a specifically human existence, one that (supposedly) unlike any other animal has become self-aware concerning the nature of its own mortality. This image reveals the presence of human beings able to represent to themselves, in thought and in art, both the inevitability of their own future deaths (the sprawled figure) and the dependence of their ephemeral lives on occasioning the death of other animals (the speared bison). What humanity discovered in its relations with the animal world, says Bataille (2005, 173), is the “fact of being suspended, hung over the abyss of death, yet full of virile force.” Yet we should be careful here not to read dominant modern sensibilities into this situation. The human figure’s erect phallus is not, Bataille claims, indicative of the kind of virility all too often characterized by that macho, warlike individualism that sets the archetypically masculine hunter above the animals he kills. His supine position confirms Bataille’s claim. Rather, as the painstaking care accorded to Lascaux’s images of living creatures—and they almost all depict living and not dead or dying creatures—also attests, this image represents the transitory vitality of human and animal lives and deaths, together with the recognition of human responsibility for the deadly consequences that the fulfillment of their desires has for other living beings. According to Bataille (2005, 171–72, my emphasis), The man is guilty of the bison’s death because a line coming from an expressly drawn propellant penetrates the animal’s stomach. Because the man is guilty, his death could therefore be taken as compensation offered by chance or perhaps voluntarily to the first victim. It is of course very difficult to assess with any accuracy the Palaeolithic artist’s intention, but the murder of an animal required expiation from its author. The author had to have rejected that which weighed down on him from the killing of his victim: he himself fell from this act, prey to the power of death, and had to have at least purified himself of a marked stain. The representation in the pit grants this situation a final consequence: he who gives death enters into death. The shared desire to live—the erect phallus, the still standing bison— marks an affinity with the hunted animals, not an ontological separation . Indeed this therianthropic figure with bird head, together with what appears to be a staff topped with a similar bird (possibly representing black grouse), also suggests the kind of affinity that typically underlies shamanic transformations, both from human to animal and [18.191.240.243] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 20...

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