An opening premise of Annabel L. Kim’s Cacaphonies is suggested by the echo of Bruno Latour in the title of the Introduction: ‘We Have Never Been Fecal’. This diagnosis informs her intention to address the ‘modern French canon’s profound excrementality’ (p. 3) and to bring it to light through reading a series of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts (by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Romain Gary, Marguerite Duras, Anne Garréta, and Daniel Pennac) in which shit (her preferred nomenclature) is confronted in its materiality and studied with attention to ‘what it means and does’ (p. 5). The Latourian gesture with which Kim begins is one of several justificatory caveats elaborated in the Introduction. The propositions that the French language and its literature is comparatively more ‘fecally invested’ (p. 15), and that the twentieth century ‘marks a return to the excrementality of excrement’ (p. 21), while contentious in themselves, may be accepted as part of the linguistic and chronological justification of the corpus. The apparatus Kim develops to authorize her corpus and methodology by antithesis merits more sustained attention: faecal ‘blindness’, ‘illusion’, and ‘filtration’ (p. 5), Kim proposes, are so many ways of avoiding the materiality of shit. She finds these avoidances particularly in the theoretical approaches of Georges Bataille and Sigmund Freud: Bataille sees shit abstractly, and everywhere but where it is, while Freud always reads ‘fecal matter through something else’ (p. 5; original emphasis). Both avoid taking ‘shit on its own terms’ (p. 5). Kim thus sets herself the challenge to deal with shit as nothing other than itself, to read it as matter, and to avoid the filtration she strategically excludes. I would suggest that Kim falls inevitably into the trap she sets for herself through the very mechanism of language: its capacity to refer and associate. In a telling example the Holocaust is evoked as ‘the most horrific and catastrophic example’ of ‘the wholesale massacre and reduction of peoples […] posited on their reduction to shit’ (p. 22). Kim is quite careful here to layer the comparison, but this precarious gesture is indicative of the difficulties she faces in sticking to the fact of faecal matter and sustaining the literality of her project. When, in the chapter on Céline, Kim cites Roland Barthes’s elegant proposition, in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, that ‘when written, shit does not have an odour’, pitting it against Céline’s insistence ‘that his work’s shit smells’ (pp. 42, 43; in English in the book under review), we find ourselves shuttling between a hyper-awareness of the inevitable absence of the object in and from the word, and the desire for — or fantasy of — a writing that ‘hits our sensorium’ (p. 43). Yet when Kim writes of Mort à credit being written ‘under the sign of shit’ or of shit as ‘a sign of death’, even of Céline’s ‘shitty politics’ (pp. 51, 39), one is reminded with Barthes of the sticky allusiveness of language; it can never be just what it is or mean just what it does; ça fait sens.