History of Shit

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This unfortunate "remnant of the earth," Freud said, quoting Goethe... By a paradox it shares with sex, excrement is surrounded by a silence that is misunderstood if not measured by the discourse it provokes. Who would believe that on this object of opprobrium, men have tirelessly been loquacious, to the point that it was present in neither their primitive deities nor the beliefs that would still animate them when they thought they had killed the barbarian within? Who would believe, for example, that for a trivial story of excrement, the holy Catholic Church nearly faced a schism? But beware of derision: the obscene does not lie where one thinks, when excrement is also this object through which the master exchanges the love of his subjects.