The Semiotics of Shit
From Slavoj Zizek’s review of Timothy Garton Ash’s Free World.
In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
I have nothing to say.
August 28th, 2004 04:29
I lived in Prague. The Czechs use and have long used German-style shit-cans and, as such, are no worse for doing so. The Czechs are a relatively peaceful lot.
August 28th, 2004 11:50
I hate you Will! (Smile.)You beat me to this article!
You do have to admit, however, that there is one really great line– “There are few things more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological, than a tenured Western academic leftist patronising an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs for liberal democracy and a few consumer goods.”
August 28th, 2004 12:05
Alina, I actually liked most of the article. Zizek is incredibly amusing.
August 29th, 2004 16:53
He is also secretly greedy, which raises his attractiveness quotient. Men who use excessively rich adjectives tend towards insatiable greed. And women whouse broad generalizations are typical of their type.