Arche texts: Lascaux, Eros, and the Anamorphic Subject

Abstract

Among the drives that motivate any intellectual inquiry is a desire to challenge the epistemological contours that define it. That is, the thresholds of any discipline also serve as the limit beyond which thinking is compelled, as the vantage point from which new configurations of the discipline become visible. By striving to advance toward that limit, genuine thinking always threatens to destroy its own practice. To think, in this sense, is to risk destruction, even selfdestruction. This possibility drives the task of thinking and renders thought, according to a classical definition, erotic: a form of pleasure that simultaneously engenders and endangers the individual. As energetic properties, epistemologies are bound by that paradoxical tendency toward self-definition and self-annihilation, self-definition as a form of self-annihilation. The developing field of prehistoric art bears such traits. The cave paintings, etchings, markings, and other