"I have to hold on to my turd until evening… I like to shit at my ease with my ass fully bared." If you can’t imagine getting a letter like this from Martha Stewart, then you too have repressed the significance of shit.

History of Shit
by Dominique Laporte
MIT Press

Reviewed by Bill Cummings

Few books give you sentences like "An analysis of power should take seriously both the sight of a sovereign holding court on his pierced chair, and the splendor of the throne as a theater of resplendent love that splatters its subjects as they bow and kneel in pursuit of a royal turd." Before reading Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit (translated from French by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury) I would have thought the fewer such sentences, the better. But now I’m not so sure.

That there is more to shit than its smell is the premise behind (sorry about that, butt puns force their way into just about every sentence I write) this slim hardback, clad in black velvety material and published by respectable MIT Press. Laporte combines low humor and high culture, academic theory and literary flourishes, deliberately offending, provoking, amusing, and above all, urging his readers to reconsider their own relationship to shit.

History of Shit skips around through historical and literary material from (mostly) the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Laporte constantly changes strategy, coming at his topic from multiple perspectives to demonstrate how intimately shit is connected to who we are today. Two primary connections surface over and over again.

First, the development of the private, modern individual subject (that’s you and me) was linked to the elimination (oops) of public filth. A 1539 French royal edict commanded that subjects confine their shitting to bathrooms in their own homes, which today hardly seems too much to ask. This is Laporte’s point: we overlook how everyday behavior like shitting is as much political as it is biological. Consider the opening of this 1694 letter from Madame la duchesse d’Orléans to the Electress of Hanover:

You are indeed fortunate to shit whenever you may please and to do so to your heart’s content!… We are not so lucky here. I have to hold on to my turd until evening: the houses next to the forest are not equipped with facilities. I have the misfortune of inhabiting one and consequently the displeasure of having to shit outside, which gravely perturbs me because I like to shit at my ease with my ass fully bared.

If you can’t imagine writing this, or getting a letter like it from, say, Martha Stewart, then you too have repressed the significance of shit and denied how this repression makes you who you are.

Second, the success of the capitalist system itself is inexorably tied to shit. This is metaphorical: greed and relentless accumulation bereft of ethical concern is shitty. But it is also literal: shit can be turned into gold by using it as fertilizer. An astonishing number of nineteenth-century social theorists were convinced that composting human waste would raise crop yields and thereby eradicate hunger and poverty. More subtly, the logic of turning shit into a valuable commodity is the purest expression of capitalism, in which everything is reduced to its utilitarian value and we pretend all problems can be solved by cost-benefit analysis.

History of Shit is a thoughtful response to something most people like to pretend they don’t do, can’t smell, and which they would prefer unmentioned. But whatever is repressed, Laporte tells us, always returns, no matter what kind of perfume we use to conceal its existence. It seems fitting to give him the last word on this: "By proposing itself as the counteragent of shit, perfume only ensures its persistence; denial only makes the proof more positive – shit is there."

Poop illustration from SmellyPoop.com
Photomodified by Oates