"The perfect – complete, clear, and distinct – knowledge that the subject has of the object is entirely external; it results from manufacture; I know what the object I have made is; I can make another one like it, but I would not be able to make another being like me in the way that a watchmaker makes a watch (or that a man in the “age of the reindeer” made a blade of sharp stone), and as a matter of fact I don’t know what the being is that I am, nor do I know what the world is and I would not be able to produce another one by any means."
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion
