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Thin body that had imperious enthusiasm,
Now perpendicular to the wounded Brute.
O killed without any pity!
Killed by what was all and, reconciled, is dying;
He, the abyss dancer, spirit, yet to be born,
Birds and perverse fruit of magics, cruelly saved.
-René Char, "Lascaux"1
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 direatens to destroy its own practice. To think, in this sense, is to risk destruction, even self-destruction. 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 graphic traces found on every continent of the earth seem to evade most attempts to establish definitive understandings of their histories, meanings, and uses. Those images fragment the already fragile discipline into art history, prehistory, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and so forth, producing a series of fault lines that divide history from prehistory, subjectivity from expression, and the discourse on visuality from the materiality of pictures. The excavation of such prehistoric archetexts-among the earliest inscriptions of the human species-undermines the very attempt to establish a unified discipline. For many of the cave paintings provide the observer with the pre-disciplinary, arche-epistemology of a primal scene-humanity's eruption onto the surface of the earth. They signal an unrepresentable intersection of annihilation and realization, the erotic interstice from which the subject emerges, an image of the subject at the instant of its appearance. In particular, many such images depict the unstable border between animality and humanity. The representation of violence that signals humanity's rupture from the continuity of the natural world can be seen in countless reflections on animality and the human form from an immemorial past, whose appearance marks the very possibility of memory...