Hunting the Mammoth, Pleistocene to Postmodern

Abstract

In the decades following the Second World War, Georges Bataille became fixated on that site of prehistoric becoming that his most prominent source, the Abbe Breuil, called “The Cradle of Humanity.” He devoted a number of essays and lectures to articulating the event of hominization that was increasingly being revealed by palaeo-archaeological evidence. In particular, he saw the cave art of Lascaux and other sites, with their sublime depictions of animals, as disclosing the advent of humanity. On a number of occasions he commented on the serendipity of these discoveries, on the weightiness of pondering prehistory in the period widely marked in Bataille‟s philosophical milieu, following Kojeve‟s lectures on Hegel, as that of history‟s end. In a 1955 lecture he remarked that: It has become commonplace today to talk about the eventual extinction of human life. The latest atomic experiments made tangible the notion of radiation invading the atmosphere and creating conditions in which life in general could no longer thrive. ...I am simply struck by the fact that light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us. In fact, only recently have we begun to discern with a kind of clarity the earthly event that was the birth of man. (Bataille, 2005: 87)