History of Shit

174 Pages·2000·18.2 MB·English

by  Dominique Laporte

History of Shit
Dominique Laporte
translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury
Written in Paris after the heady days of student revolt in May 1968 and before the devastation H
of the AIDS epidemic, History of Shitis emblematic of a wild and adventurous strain of 1970s’
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theoretical writing that attempted to marry theory, politics, sexuality, pleasure, experimenta-
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tion, and humor. Radically redefining dialectical thought and post-Marxist politics, it takes an
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important—and irreverent—position alongside the works of such postmodern thinkers as
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Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard.
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Laporte’s eccentric style and ironic sensibility combine in an inquiry that is provocative,
humorous, and intellectually exhilarating. Debunking all humanist mythology about the Y
grandeur of civilization, History of Shitsuggests instead that the management of human waste is
crucial to our identities as modern individuals—including the organization of the city, the rise O
of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the mandate for clean and proper F
HISTORY OF
language. Far from rising above the muck, Laporte argues, we are thoroughly mired in it, par-
ticularly when we appear our most clean and hygienic. s
s h i t
Laporte’s style of writing is itself an attack on our desire for “clean language.” Littered with h
lengthy quotations and obscure allusions, and adamantly refusing to follow a linear argument,
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History of Shitbreaks the rules and challenges the conventions of “proper” academic discourse.
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Dominique Laporte, who died in 1984 at the age of thirty-five, was a psychoanalyst and the
coauthor of Français national: Politique et practiques de la langue nationale sous la Révolution
Française.
A DOCUMENTS BOOK “Few manage to link so many ideas, as Laporte
has done so effortlessly.”
—Architecture
“Laporte’s postmodern tangents and eccentric
writing style pose a challenge to academic and “. . . Laporte’s inquiry is as rich, witty, and
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societal conventions of ‘clean language.’” exhilarating as it is intellectually adventurous.”
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—Publishers Weekly —Adam Newey, New Statesman P
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The MIT Press
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology •Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 • E DOMINIQUE LAPORTE
http://mitpress.mit.edu
0-262-62160-6
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HISTORY OF
s h i t
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
French edition originally published in 1978 under the title Histoire de
la merde (Prologue), ' Christian Bourgois E«diteur, 1993.
HISTORY OF
s h i t
DOMINIQUE LAPORTE
translation by
Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, with an
introduction by Rodolphe el-Khoury
A DOCUMENTS BOOK
This translation
' 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Documents Magazine, Inc.
French edition originally published in 1978 under the title Histoire de la merde (Prologue),
' 1993 Christian Bourgois E«diteur
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Filosofia Regular by Graphic Composition, Inc. and was
printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laporte, Dominique-Gilbert, 1949—1984.
[Histoire de la merde. English]
History of shit / Dominique Laporte ; translated by Nadia Benabid and
Rodolphe el-Khoury ; with an introduction by Rodolphe el-Khoury.
p. cm.
(cid:210)A Documents book.(cid:211)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-12225-1 (hc : alk. paper)
1. Feces(cid:209)Miscellanea. I. Title.
GT2835.L3613 2000
394(cid:209)dc21
99-046032
To the young
Flaubert,
for the beautiful
explanation
¥
1. 2. 3.
introduction the gold of cleaning up in front the colonial
language, of one(cid:213)s house, thing
the luster of scybala heaping
against the wall
viii 2 26 56
4. 5. 6.
non olet make-up (cid:210)i(cid:213)m with notes
shakspeare(cid:211)
[sic]
76 96 118 148
introduction
Rodolphe el-Khoury
Dominique Laporte(cid:213)s History of Shitties the concept of the indivi-
dual to the fate of human waste and, in a twist that Georges Bataille
would have certainly appreciated, the history of shit becomes the
history of subjectivity. This conflation of the (cid:210)highest(cid:211) forms of
consciousness with the (cid:210)basest(cid:211) of human products is examined
in various instances of discourse and practice, language and expe-
rience. The subtitle to the French edition, (cid:210)Prologue,(cid:211) frames the
book as a beginning(cid:209)a prehistory to modernity and the modern
subject.
In History of Shit,Laporte considers the semantic atrophy of
the olfactory field, a condition he relates to the Royal Academy(cid:213)s
systematic cleansing of the French language, whose malodorous
features were stifled by a thorough editing of its excremental
vocabulary throughout the seventeenth century. Laporte(cid:213)s earlier
and better-known book, Le Fran(cid:141)ais national: politique et pratiques
de la langue nationale sous la Revolution Fran(cid:141)aise, co-authored
with Ren(cid:142)e Balibar, offers a detailed history of similar institu-
tional efforts that shaped official French, focusing on the in-
viii
strumental role of a streamlined and rationalized language in the
¥
ix construction of a centralized capitalist state.1
One can imagine History of Shitas a by-product of Le Fran(cid:141)ais
national(cid:209)an aberrant discursive surplus that would have cor-
rupted the balanced logic of that more traditional Marxist text, had
it not been (cid:210)laundered(cid:211) by scrupulous editors. In History of Shit,
Laporte freely indulges his scatological proclivities, drawing on
the psychoanalytic frameworks of Freud and Lacan and holding
Marx and Althusser at an uninhibiting arm(cid:213)s length.2
That History of Shit might be considered recycled waste
would certainly have appealed to Laporte, given the leitmotif of
thebook: the return of excrement to fields of cultural production
and consumption whose proper operation depends on its repres-
sion. The notion is also entirely consistent with Laporte(cid:213)s parody of
academic discourse,3and with his convoluted prose, which this
translation attempts to preserve; for it stands as a backhanded at-
tempt to reverse the deodorization of language by means of a reek-
ing syntax.
Lest anyone take his scatological fixation too seriously,
Laporte states his critical ambition in quasi-Nietzschean terms:
(cid:210)All we can hope to do is remove a few masks with the roar of our
laughter, laugh them off the figures of power.(cid:211) Herein lies the
redeemable (and formidable) value of this excremental excursus(cid:209)
in its conjunction of the ridiculous with the profound, which has
insights sparking with every claim of Laporte(cid:213)s (cid:210)gay science.(cid:211) Read-
ers will no doubt laugh along with the author at the outrageous
claims(cid:209)both reported and argued(cid:209)in this book; but the speculative
trajectories that Laporte engineers at such dizzying speed are no
laughing matter when followed through to their grave conclusions.
introduction
Consider, for example, Laporte(cid:213)s reading of the Royal Edict
of Villers-Cotterets from 1539, and its staggering social, cultural,
and even environmental implications. The Edict decreed the pri-
vate management of waste(cid:209)(cid:210)to each his shit.(cid:211) Laporte recognizes
here the beginning of a formative historical process and goes on to
map the construction of the (cid:210)I(cid:211) across private and public spheres,
reconfigured in the domesticization of individual waste and odor,