ABSTRACT
The relation between death and painting is more than causal. The two are structurally intertwined in a less than stable manner attested to by the variety of paintings depicting Butades's daughter and her lover. Bataille's point of departure is the erect male organs featuring in cave paintings, such as an obscure image from the caves of Lascaux depicting a man falling in front of a dying bison. Painting in Western culture is perceived as an act whose origin is a moment of loss and whose future is a series of repetitions. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, what is at stake in the structural shift manifest in Hegel's Aesthetics is yet another form of repetition. Art finds its origin in the human spirit arising from culture—it is uniquely human. There are fundamental differences—thematic, conceptual and historical—between the arguments of philosophers such as Hegel, Danto, Vattimo and Derrida and earlier writers on art such as Pliny the Elder and Alberti.
