Drawing from Bataille’s work on the inferences of the reciprocal relations between human registration through the animal-human cave figures of Lascaux and the Chauvet caves of Southern France (as documented in Werner Herzog’s 2010 film ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’), this paper will consider images of becoming-animal not through ‘codifications’ or ‘resemblances’, ‘the informe’ or ‘transgressions’, but as images-in-process that offer insight into the affectivity of the ‘sacred’ of the animal-human. I explore how the sacred of this process is in fact a sited form of labour, a place that is made by a specific set of circumstances, which move through transversal applications and uses. The process of becoming imagines its past course of action within this image; it is a past that Bataille offers as a continuum of creative becomings. While Bataille’s Lascaux work has been read in terms of a Bataillian mode of desire, I want to argue for the polar prosaic of this desiring mode. These are the terms of the affective labour that the face and reversal of animal to human to animal provides. The transsemiotic, political constitution of such images of becoming are also that of the mundanity of the animal, its labour-affectiveness and use-value to human practices. As the affective animal reveals, the sacred can take many forms and offers much for human thinking.
Anyone any the wiser?