History of Shit (review)

Abstract

The Frenchman, wrote Charles Baudelaire in "My Heart Laid Bare," "does not mind filth in his home, and in literature he is scatophagous. He is mad about excrement." 1 Dominique Laporte carries this tradition into the late twentieth century in History of Shit, published in France in 1978. This essay on the discourse of excretion and recuperation opens with an examination of the royal decree of 1539 regulating the disposal of human waste in Paris, and concludes with Pierre Leroux's socialist (today we would say ecologist) theory of the circulus, written more than three centuries later: citizens' excretions, far from being dangerous waste to be banished, must be collected by the state to assure the production of what is necessary to sustain citizens. Laporte pursues two interrelated strands of argument, Foucauldian and Marxist, rooted in the French intellectual environment of the late 1970s. The 1539 decree was an exemplar of the new disciplines, responsibilities, and boundaries that created the modern state and the individual: "Totalitarianism simply involves (indeed, is predicated on) the relegation of shit to the private realm" (p. 66). There is no public shit—it becomes sewage—and this loss of the communal to the dialectic of the individual and the state is at the core of Laporte's argument. His gloss on the privatization of bodily functions in ensuing centuries resonates with Michel Foucault's contemporaneous explorations of the play of repression and liberation in the discourse of sexuality: "We dare not speak about shit. But, since the beginning of time no other subject—not even sex—has caused us to speak so much" (p. 112).