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Dominique Laporte. History of Shit. Translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury. A Documents Book. Originally published as Histoire de la merde (Pro logue) (1978). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. xiii + 160 pp. Ill. $12.95 (paperbound, 0-262-62160-6).
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."' 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...