The contribution of this study to existing scholarship is threefold. First, it extends heterology’s timeline beyond the late 1930s to encompass the final phase of Bataille’s career devoted to prehistory. It argues that heterology’s keyword – the wholly other – furnished an entry point into the prehistoric past marginalized by traditional historiography. Second, it demonstrates that the exemplar of prehistory’s otherness is silence. Along with Maurice Blanchot, Bataille forged a modernist aesthetics that promotes silence as an interruption of speech. It (...) therefore concludes that interruption – frequently dismissed as a sign of Bataille’s deficiencies or in contradiction with his goal of continuity – recaptures the continuum lost when archaic humans invented work, language, and a deferral to the future. With sections on religious experience, markings, eroticism, and the rupture between animals and humans, this study offers an introduction to prehistory in Bataille for specialists and general readers willing to plunge into what scholars now describe as deep history. (shrink)

This article's polemical thrust begins with Georges Bataille's 1956 critique of Tristes Tropiques, where Lévi-Strauss omits the Palaeolithic while extolling the Neolithic advent of agriculture and sedentism. Whereas Lévi-Strauss describes his own thinking as Neolithic, he characterizes it in ways that resemble the behaviour of hunter-gatherers and nomads. I trace this contradiction to current scholarship willing to challenge the long-standing narrative bias that either ignores the Palaeolithic and/or derides it in favour of the Neolithic, now subject to refutations of its (...) alleged advantages. Further theoretical backbone is provided by Ibn Khaldun and Bataille on the centrality of luxury. Thus, Palaeolithic cave art's social dimension as the expression of a privileged few is contrasted with the view of scholars who see it as the product of an egalitarian society indifferent to material gain. Bataille remains a key reference due to his exceptional commitment to prehistory, a relatively underexploited facet of his work. (shrink)

In response to Walter Benjamin's caveat that every image of the past not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably, this essay examines images of spitting in the work of Michel de Montaigne and Georges Bataille. By resisting insertion within codified cycles of exchange-especially those of institutionalized violence-their images exemplify a defiance to servitude that can be generalized to a theory of sovereignty. An archaeological inventory indicates possibilities provided by the montage of images (...) for the construction of a heterological counterhistory, where spit and spitting challenge the dominance of spirit in Western culture. (shrink)