Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, and: History of Shit (review)

In his elaboration of the child's developing psyche, Freud reminds us that the first product of human creativity is not speech, but matter or hyle, the very stuff of life itself. Unquestionably mindful of the ontic primacy of the neonatal gift, in outlining his grammar of motives Kenneth Burke was led to (de)posit a "demonic trinity" of the fundamental principles responsible for the invention of "cloacal ambiguities" in discourse: "the erotic, [the] urinary, and [the] excremental." These principles, argued Burke, can be said to organize the any number of tropic innovations in the register of the purely purposive—particularly in terms of mystical speech. The use of "rain" as poetic metaphor, for example, could be said to stimulate the erotic pleasure of urination. "Similarly," continues Burke, "the 'excremental' nature of invective or vilification would allow for a translation of erotic purpose from 'love' into 'war'" (A Grammar of Motives, 300-303). Whatever the rhetorical labor Burke's "negative theology" can be said to exert, however, at the center of its logic is the triumph of the sign—most especially the triumph of the sign-as-image within the logics of capital—over the Real, the ability of language to mediate our relationship to the universe and isolate us in a mental world of symbolicity: the words rain and love, like invective and war, do not smell. In the civilized world, the gift of speech supplants the gift of rectal excreta, and the divine positivity of God and His word sentences humanity to a never-ending, religious hygienics. As Burke has observed, after our entry into language, we automatically become "rotten with perfection."

Within the last ten years, there has been a fomenting interest in scholarship devoted to returning smell—the material, the repressed—to the body, particularly among scholars working in a feminist, psychoanalytic, or Foucauldian/Deleuzian idiom (as Deleuze and Guattari bluntly remind us in Anti-Oedipus, the subject is a "desiring machine" that "breathes . . . heats . . . eats. . . . shits and fucks"). In keeping with this general trajectory of interest in the materiality of the body and discourse (not to mention the gleeful dispatch of profanity into academic space), a number of recent studies have focused on "bad language" as a way to peel back layers of historical discourse to expose the body's primitive, dialectical exchange with the symbolic. These studies might be said to complement Burke's Demonic Trinity, which begins with the material body and works up, with a parallel "Unholy Trinity," which begins with language and works down: It is comprised of the obscene, the profane, and the blasphemous. Read together, Alain Cabantous's Blasphemy and Laporte's History of Shit provide an insightful description of discursive formation of the public subjectvis-à-vis the rise of the Modern State through an examination of the blasphemous and the obscene. Each study marks an attempt, in other words, to capture the formation of publics and public bodies by examining that which is expressly evacuated from speech and sight—the Unholy Trinity.

As "France's most respected historian of the sea, pirates, and the navy" (jacket), Cabantous was undoubtedly led to write about impious speech as a consequence of studying pirates and other cursing seamen. His study begins with a premise first popularized by Mary Douglas's anthropological 1966 investigation of the purity/pollution dialectic. In her widely read Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Douglas asserted that "eliminating is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment," and that "some pollutions are used as analogies for expressing a general view...