22. Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I, p. 251. Informe translates as "unformed," although Bataille intends the word to undo the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter.

23. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. I, p. 253.

24. Ibid., p. 251. This notion of the double sense of the root word of a given concept takes into account Freud's interest in this kind of etymological study in which precisely altus and sacer are used as examples. See Freud's "Antithetical Sense of Primal Words," published in 1910 in the Jahrbuch für psychoa- und psychopath. Forschungen, vol. I, as a review of Karl Abel's Gegensinn der Urworte. For Bataille's knowledge of this text, see Denis Hollier, La Prise de la Concorde, Paris, Gallimard, 1974, p. 240.

25. Obviously Bataille was dependent upon the ethnological data available to him at the time, from which he made his own particular selection in order to support his critique of philosophy. For a discussion of Bataille's connection to ethnography in the 1920s and '30s see Alfred Métraux, "Rencontre avec les ethnologues," Critique, no. 195-196 (1963), 677-684.

26. In Jean Babelon, L'Art précolumbien, Paris, Editions Beaux-Arts, 1930. This collection of essays was to accompany the 1928 Exposition de l'art de l'amerique, in the Pavillon de Marsan and included texts by Alfred Métraux and Paul Rivet, among others. Pre-Columbian art was seen at the time as occupying a continuous field with that of Africa and Oceania; for example, in the text "L'Art nègre" that Zervos wrote to introduce a special issue of Cahiers d'art (no. 7-8, 1927), he speaks of "the attachment of our generation for art nègre" specifying, "That is what was produced twenty years ago with Negro sculpture, it is what is produced right now with Melanesian and pre-Columbian art" (p. 230). On this same subject Breton wrote: "The very particular interest that painters at the beginning of the 20th century had for African art, today it is American art from before the conquest that, along with Oceanic art, exercises an elective influence on artists" (Breton, Mexique, Paris, Renous and Colle, 1939, preface). The Breton and Eluard collections auctioned in 1931 were given over to pre-Columbian art to almost as great an extent as to Oceanic objects. The 1936 exhibition of surrealist objects at the Charles Ratton Gallery included American objects along with those of Oceania, the catalogue specifies these American works as Eskimo, Peruvian, and pre-Columbian.

27. Métraux, "Rencontre avec les ethnologues."

28. Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. I, p. 152.

29. Ibid., p. 157.

30. Zervos, "Notes sur la sculpture contemporaine," p. 472.

31. For an account of the way Bataille's thought was shaped by Mauss, see Métraux, "Rencontre avec les ethnologues." Another discussion of this relationship is James Clifford's "On Ethnographic Surrealism," Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXIII (October 1981), 543-564.

32. Hohl insists on Giacometti's knowledge and employment of the kind of precise ethnographic information about the contexts of tribal art that would have come to him easily through his connection with Leiris (Hohl, 1972, p. 79.). In an interview with the author (February 24, 1983) Leiris supplied no detailed information but agreed that Giacometti was present at discussions concerning ethnography held by the Documents group.

33. Along with Miró and Arp, Giacometti exhibited in the autumn of 1930 at the Galerie Pierre. Georges Sadoul recalls, "At the end of 1930 I met Alberto Giacometti. He had just been admitted into the Surrealist group . . . In 1930 he introduced a new mode into Surrealism with his sculptures that were mobile objects. This launched the vogue of Surrealist objects with a symbolic or erotic function, the making of which became practically obligatory" (Cited in Hohl, 1972, p. 249). The date of Dali's "Objets à fonctionnement symbolique" ( Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, no. 3 [1931], 16-17), demonstrates this later attempt to absorb Giacometti's innovative work into the heart of the surrealist movement.

34. Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme, Paris, Seuil, 1945, p. 176.

35. Bataille's article "l'OEil," Documents, no. 4 (1929)-the same issue that carried the first essay on Giacometti's work (Michel Leiris, "Alberto Giacometti," 209-210)-opens with a discussion of this image and lists the various screenings of Chien Andalou as the places where the image had been reproduced. Not only does Bataille's concentration on the theme of the eye carry forward his own preoccupations from L'Histoire de L'OEil, but through Marcel Griaule's article on the evil eye and its significance in primitive belief systems, published in this number as well, the link is once more forged between ethnographic analysis and modern thematic interests.

36. In his article "La pointe à l'oeil d'Alberto Giacometti," Cahiers du Musée National d'art Moderne, no. 11 (1983), 64-100), Jean Clair argues for the direct connection between Bataille's eroticized phallic conception of the eye, as found in both L'Histoire de l'Oeil and the Documents material, and Giacometti's sculpture Point to the Eye. His discussion of this work turns, in part, on Bataille's notion of vision objectified at the limiting condition of the exorbited eye.

37. See Frans Blom "The Maya Ball-Game Pok-Ta-Pok" Middle American: Papers, Tulane University, 1932. This essay published in the 1930s represents the level of ethnographic knowledge of the ballgame at the time we are here considering.

38. Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, Maeght, 1962, p. 88.

39. Jacques Dupin told me that when he began work on his monograph on Giacometti, the sculptor lent him his own carefully protected, full set of Documents to work from. For one of the Documents articles on this subject, illustrated by codex representations of the victims and the places of sacrifice, see Roger Hervé, "Sacrifices humains du Centre-Amérique," Documents, II, no. 4 (1930).

40. Cahiers d'art, no. 10 (1929), 456, reproduces a photograph of an Aztec pyramid topped by an altar whose structure is suggestive for that of l'Heure des traces.

41. Alberto Giacometti, "Hier, sables mouvants," Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 5 (1933).

42. Alberto Giacometti, "A propos de Jacques Callot," Labyrinthe, no. 7 (April 15, 1945), 3. This essay relates the fascination with horror and destruction on the part of Callot, Goya, and Gericault: "For these artists there is a frenetic desire for destruction in every realm, up to that of human consciousness itself." In a thought that is obviously close to Bataille, Giacometti concludes that in order to understand this one would have to speak, "on the one hand of the pleasure in destruction that one finds in children of their cruelty . . . and on the other hand of the subject matter of art." "Le rêve, le Sphinx et la mort de T.," Labyrinthe, no. 22/23 (December 15, 1946), 12-13. Not only does the story of the spider, in the dream recounted in this text, recall Bataille's theme of the informe, but the description of T.'s head, rendered hideously objective by death, is pure Bataille. Become "an object, a little, measurable, insignificant box," the head is seen as a rotting cadaver, "miserable debris to be thrown away," into the mouth of which, to Giacometti's horror, a fly enters.

43. Hohl declares, for example, "It is certain that the club and sphere forms that Picasso elaborated in his Projet pour un monument informed the structure of Suspended Ball (Hohl, 1972, p. 81).