The thesis of Laporte’s text is, in a certain sense, a logically
consequent assertion arising from an appreciation of Marxist materialism
in conjunction with Freudian psychoanalysis: Laporte maintains
that the history of subjectivity is reflected within the history
of civilization’s techniques for dealing with excrement; in particular,
the Western subject’s historical development coincides with-perhaps,
at the “basest” of levels, is even decisively influenced
by-its relationship to its own waste. As a materialist, Laporte
is committed to the notion that the human subject, rather than
being a disembodied metaphysical/transcendental molder of the
physical world, is the residual by-product of its concrete, material
conditions. But, adding a twist derived from Freud’s claim that
civilization is defined by its obsession with “order, beauty,
and cleanliness” (a claim made in Civilization and Its Discontents),
Laporte goes much further than most Marxists, who tend to discuss
“material conditions” solely as the conditions of economic
production; Laporte, drawing additional influence from the psychoanalytic
equation of money/gold with feces, boldly contends that the fundamental,
underlying material condition that the socio-political infrastructure
of civilization aims to domesticate is the human being’s need
to defecate. The History of Shit is, thus far, the sole
representative of a very different brand of Freudo-Marxism from
the standard version of this theoretical marriage made familiar
by the Frankfurt School (however, one could cite Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death and
Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death as
situated within a similar line of approach to that of Laporte,
since both Brown and Becker see fit to discuss in relative detail
the psychical/subjective significance of defecation).

Given the preceding description of the book’s basic argument,
one might be tempted to understand this as a variation on Julia
Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” (as outlined in her
text Powers of Horror).
However, Laporte’s argument involves a precise inversion of Kristeva’s
position: whereas Kristeva claims that the “sujet propre”
(the clean/proper subject) is sustained by the distance it maintains
from such “foul,” “disgusting,” and “revolting”
things as shit, piss, corpses, and so on (i.e., the subject, in
Freudian parlance, rejects/disavows the unpleasantness of its
body), Laporte insists that the various practices by which the
subject explicitly engages with such things as its excremental
functions are defining features of the very structure of subjectivity
per se. Rather than rejecting/disavowing its shit outright, as
would be maintained by Kristeva, the Laportean subject sublimates
it, employing it as fertilizer, using it as a beauty product (Laporte
mentions that, even up to the 18^th century, some women
rubbed feces on their faces to maintain a beautiful complexion),
“alchemically transforming” it into gold (in the bourgeois
“retention” of capital, for example), and so on. In
short, civilization and its attendant forms of subjectivity wallow
in filth.

In terms of the book’s style, one would do best to imagine Foucault,
Bataille, and Schreber teaming up to produce a genealogical study-this
is what it would look like. In fact, Laporte’s text is a highly
unusual piece of theoretical writing in that, while reading it,
one has a great degree of difficulty separating the humorous from
the serious (or, as Laporte would put it in his scatological terms,
the solid from the liquid). Does he really mean what he says?
Is this simply a parody of the 1970s Parisian intellectual scene
and the then-fashionable practice of writing theoretical histories?
Or, is there an element of seriousness to the claims advanced
here? Even if Laporte intends this as nothing more than an elaborate
joke, The History of Shit contains-in psychoanalysis, all
jokes convey, intricately encoded within themselves, a repressed
kernel of unconscious truth-an unavoidable insight that must be
grappled with by a whole range of contemporary theoretical positions.
As Slavoj Zizek has aptly observed (in the preface to his 1999
book The Ticklish Subject),
Western academia today is haunted by “the specter of the
Cartesian subject”: despite the various differences separating
approaches ranging from feminism to cognitive science, nearly
all contemporary humanistic paradigms are united in their denunciation
of Descartes’ (supposed) separation of mind from body. Marxists,
Freudians, phenomenologists, and others all insist that the cognizing
subject must be reintegrated with its corporeal condition. Embodiment
theorists, for instance, never tire of stressing that the experiential
self is harmoniously interwoven with the fabric of the “lived
body.”

However, Laporte implicitly challenges this piece of pervasive
academic doxa in two ways. First, in accepting the anti-Cartesian
thesis that the subject cannot be divorced from its body, Laporte
extends this thesis “to the end”: if one really wishes
to discuss a fully embodied subject, then one eventually must
confront the less-than-palatable vision of the human being as
ultimately reducible to mouth and anus (as a mere “material
circuit,” a brute, vulgar input-output mechanism-something
glimpsed in the work of Deleuze and Guattari). Second, this genealogy
reveals a sort of repression operative at the heart of various
forms of embodiment theory: despite all the noisy emphasis contemporary
theorists place upon the body, one cannot help but notice that
they remain silent when it comes to the daily ritual of squatting
over the “porcelain throne,” this most basic of physical
requirements. A descriptive phenomenological study has yet to
written regarding the act of defecation. Is this an innocent oversight
on the part of the otherwise enthusiastic advocates of embodiment,
or does it testify to a hidden hypocritical selectivity on their
part? Is the subject only embodied when it comes to its more pleasant,
titillating, and aesthetically agreeable physical functions (one
cannot help but notice the plethora of studies concerning sexuality
in comparison with the nearly total absence of analyses addressing
defecation)? Laporte thus “ups the ante” for anyone
jumping on the trendy bandwagon of Descartes bashing, forcing
them, so to speak, to put their money where their rhetorical mouths
are. Undoubtedly, The History of Shit makes for excellent
toilet reading.

Adrian Johnston recently
completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. His dissertation
was Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive.

Categories: General, Psychoanalysis

Tags: Psychoanalysis