Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit ties
the concept of the individual 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 “highest” forms of
consciousness with the “basest” of human products is examined in various
instances of discourse and practice, language and experience. The subtitle to
the French edition, “Prologue”, frames the book as a beginning -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’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’s earlier and better-known book, Le
Français national: politique et pratiques de la langue nationale sous la
Revolution Franaise, co authored with Renée Balibar, offers a
detailed history of similar institutional efforts that shaped official French,
focusing on the instrumental role of a streamlined and rationalized language in
the construction of a centralized capitalist state. [...]
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario