Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature

The new book ‘Cacaphonies’ takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view 20th- and 21st-century French literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim argues for feces as a figure of radical equality. ‘Cacaphonies’ reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life. Here, Kim is joined in conversation by Merve Emre, Rachele Dini, and Laure Murat.

Annabel L. Kim is the Roy G. Clouse associate professor of Romance Literatures and Languages at Harvard University. A specialist in 20th- and 21st-century French literature, Kim is author of ‘Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions’ and ‘Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature.’

Merve Emre is an associate professor of literature at the University of Oxford and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Rachele Dini is senior lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Roehampton, London.

Laure Murat is professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA’s Department of European Languages & Transcultural Studies and author of several books.

Episode references:

Louis-Ferdinand Céline; Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)

Caca communism

Jean Genet

Kristin Ross (Fast Cars, Clean Bodies)

Susan Signe Morrison

Philip Roth (Patrimony)

Anne Garréta

Samuel Beckett (Molloy)

Rey Chow

James Joyce (Ulysses/Leopold Bloom)

Alain Resnais (Providence)

Episode Transcript

Laure Murat (00:09):
French universalism has specificities. How does that
apply to the concreteuniversalism you're offering
with fiscality?

Merve Emre (00:21):
Ideally, we would all be both producers and
consumers of shit. And if wedemocratize the sphere of
production and consumption, thenwe would live in a world in
which we could make judgmentsabout the canon that were purely
symbolic.

Rachele Dini (00:40):
One could either say, okay, all literature deals
with this, or one can go intothe particularities.

Annabel L. Kim (00:47):
Shit is like language in that regard. It is
concrete. It is abstract. It isworkable. It can be worked with.
Hello, everybody. I'm AnnabelKim. I'm the Vyjie Klaus
associate professor of RomanceLanguages and Literatures at
Harvard. It is my distinctpleasure to be here today with
L'hommeura, Raquel Adini, MerveEmre, who so generously come to

(01:12):
discuss my new book, Caca Fonie,the experimental canon of French
literature, which, as you mighttell from the title, is a book
about shit in the literaturethat French people think is the
shit, but forget is full ofshit. And, it's a book that I
didn't expect to write.
I, kind of fell into it throughteaching, which I imagine is how
we often stumble acrossprojects, germs that turn into

(01:34):
something much bigger. Butreally has to do with having
taught Celine, who was the startof my fecal, constellation, And
teaching the the text voyage ofboulain me during to the end of
the night twice, and having bothsets of students who were very,
very different, totallyincapable of remembering without
my prodding them and giving themthe exact page number and

(01:55):
discussion, is a kind ofspectacular joys cock a
communism scene, which featureslots of big, spectacular joyous
caca communism scene, whichfeatures lots of big, burly, red
faced men, grunting anddefecating communally in the New
York City in these, toiletstalls that have the doors, torn
off. This is a huge book.There's a lot of stuff going on,
but I think it's one of the mostmemorable scenes. And I was
struck that across the board,all the students would just pass

(02:17):
over and look at me withcomplete blank stares as if I
were some sort of raging poomaniac when I wanted to talk
about this passage.
I was just like, Interesting.You know, maybe these kids are
just super repressed. Twice, Ithought, what is going on? And
then I taught the book as partof a survey course on on a
twentieth century kind of comingof age narrative. And just by

(02:39):
happenstance, about a third ofmy corpus, many of which are in
kakafune, was also full of shit.
And me being me and not subjectto the fecal taboo because I'm
Korean American, I grew up withfricality, just a normal part of
everyday life. I'm like, let'stalk about all this shit. And
for every single work, studentswould just look at me blankly.

(02:59):
And I'm like, we all know thatstudents often don't do all the
reading. But for so manystudents to not do this reading
for so many of the texts, Ithought, this is weird.
There there is a fecalblindness. I feel crazy. Why am
I the only one seeing this? Sothe desire for people to kinda
pass on to more polite subjectto conversation like, I don't
know, like sexuality, I don'tknow why that's considered more

(03:21):
polite than fucality. Ifanything, I think it's much more
obscene and to be passed over.
I thought, okay. I think there'ssomething there. I seem to be
equipped with a singular fecalsensibility, So I might as well
take advantage of that becauseif I don't, then I don't think
anybody will. So that was thebirth of Cacafone, and, Merve
had the fantastic idea oftalking about kind of singular

(03:43):
fecal encounters that we've hadin our lifetimes. And I have one
that I allude to in a note.
So I I guess I'll leave that asa as a as a little Easter egg,
but I'll talk about one strikingencounter that I've had, which
entails this is this is not oneof those, oh, a friend. This is
me. Where I was sitting on thetoilet, I was straining and
straining and making a reallyeffortful bowel movement. And

(04:04):
then when I got up after wipingand to flush, there was nothing
in the toilet bowl. So I don'tknow if this counts as a as a
fecal encounter, Merve, but I'mjust like, how is it that I
could feel it come out of me andthere is nothing?
So it's the story of the magicdisappearing poo. Hopefully,
with Cacafone, it's the oppositewhere I can prove to you that

(04:25):
it's not invisible, that therereally is a bear there.

Merve Emre (04:29):
I think I should introduce myself next since you
named me in that comment. I'mMerve Emre. I'm an associate
professor of literature at theUniversity of Oxford, and I'm a
contributing writer at the NewYorker. And, Annabelle, I love
so much what you say about thedisappearing poo. And I wonder
if I can tell two stories, oneabout me and one about a friend

(04:50):
that I think get at thedifferent ways in which we do or
do not register the materialityof what you brilliantly call
fecal universalism in the book.
The first is that the mostsurprising and the most absent
shit I can remember taking waswhen I gave birth. So most
people do not tell you when yougive birth that you will

(05:11):
involuntarily shit yourself. Andin fact, this is what I did, but
I could not feel it becausethere was so much other pain.
And so the sensation of beingsuddenly enveloped or having
your bottom enveloped as as yousay in that one in your
wonderful reading of Celine.Right?
Of suddenly having your bottomenveloped in shit, and that

(05:35):
being as it were a kind ofpreexisting condition that
suddenly it it's there and youdon't know when it arrived and
when it will be taken away is afascinating encounter with a
kind of materiality that makesitself known without you knowing
where it originates from. And II love that as a kind of
illustration of fecaluniversalism. The other story

(05:56):
did not happen to me, I swear. Iheard this at a bachelorette
party. A friend hooked up with aguy, went to his apartment.
The next morning, he said, Ihave to go to work. The door
locks behind you. Take yourtime. Leave whenever. And she
took a shit in his toilet, butit was so big that it clogged
the toilet.
And she went and she found aplastic bag, put her hand in it,

(06:20):
pulled it out, tied it up theway that you might a dog shit,
and put it on the kitchencounter to take with her when
she left. She got dressed. Shegot her things. She walked out
of the door. The door clickedbehind her, and she realized
that she had left her gigantic

Annabel L. Kim (06:39):
Oh my god.

Merve Emre (06:40):
On his kitchen counter. And this seems to me a
kind of opposite materiality ofshit, of cacophonie, which is
that it is clearly bounded. Itis bagged. You know to whom it
belongs. It has a very distincttemporality, and there is no way

(07:03):
for you to retrieve it or toredeem yourself from that sign
of your fecal universalism.
So I offer those to you as mytwo readings of memorable
encounters with shit.

Annabel L. Kim (07:15):
That's brilliant. And I think that is
about as strong an argumentagainst identitarianism and
proprietariness and possessionas as we can get.

Laure Murat (07:24):
So, my name is Laura Murat. I'm a professor at
UCLA in the department ofEuropean languages and cultural
studies, where I teach Frenchliterature from the nineteenth
to the twenty first century.I've also been the director of
the Center for European Studiesat UCLA. I wrote a few books,
the last one being a short essayon cancel culture entitled, or

(07:50):
who cancels what, published in02/2022 at the edition du seu in
France. And I'm currentlyworking with the same publisher
on several projects.
One of them being a biography ofMonique Wittig, which is
related, of course, toAnnabelle, interest. I'm

(08:12):
extremely sorry, but I wannahave a superb, you know, story
about shit like this. I mean,I'm way behind. But I can say
that I have a an emotionalresponse, daily response to shit
since I grab the poop of my dogevery day, three times a day. So
that's my experience of shitevery day, and that's okay.

(08:37):
That's enough for me.

Rachele Dini (08:39):
My name is Raquel Edini. I am senior lecturer in
English and American literatureat the University of Roehampton
in London. And, Anabelle and Iknow each other through the
International Literary WasteStudies Network, which I set up
a few years ago to bring peopletogether who people who work on
waste in its various forms. I'mvery excited about this

(09:00):
particular subset of waste oradjacent category to waste. So
and my first book was on waste,on consumerism, waste, and reuse
in twentieth century fiction.
And my second book is onappliances in American
literature, which is also aboutkind of cleanliness and and
hygiene. And I'm just starting aproject about, the influence of
social political crises oncleaning product ads since 1963,

(09:24):
which is essentially a projectabout the way in which, feces
and and dirt and waste don't gettalked about or only get brought
up in order to otherwise. Yeah.So lots of really interesting
connections, and I'm so excitedto be here with you. In terms
I've got a couple of ofanecdotes.
They're not really funny. I havehad IBS, irritable bowel
syndrome, since as long as I canremember. Apparently, when

(09:46):
changing my diaper, my mom usedto put a little Q tip up my
bottom to release the airbecause I have such bad gas. So
I feel like I've spent aninordinate time in my life in
toilets and have come tounderstand different kinds of
toilets and different nationstoilets and also, you know, the
different kinds of poos onemakes depending on what country
one is in. So I've grown upbetween Italy and The States And

(10:08):
also the attitudes of thosedifferent countries to poo.
And also kind of the familialrelationship to them. So I grew
up with my grandfather on mymom's side who would take every
fairy tale and subvert it sothat somebody would shit
themselves by the end. So myfavorite was Little Red Riding
Hood. The big bad wolf wasrehabilitated. He was actually a
very nice guy, and he was just across dresser.

(10:31):
He dressed in his thegrandmother's clothes, and they
just swapped clothes. But hesaves Little Red Riding Hood and
her mom from some robbers whoshot themselves the moment that
they saw him. Whereas mypaternal granddad basically died
of starvation because he hadcancer, and he didn't want the
nurse to wipe his bottom and andchange his diaper. And his wife,

(10:54):
with whom he was very unhappilymarried, refused to do it. And
so he'd always had you know,he'd been in a ricksick for
decades and decades.
And so he stopped drinking andstopped eating, and that's how
he died. And the reason why I'mbringing this up is that it was
what I was thinking about whenreading Annabelle's chapter
about the ethics of care and theinstinct that we have to care
for others. And I can't think ofa better example than my

(11:16):
grandmother's refusal of, youknow, the fact that sometimes
there's a different instinct,which is I want you to die.
That's less humorous, but Ithink that there's, you know,
really, really interesting,serious, painful, both physical
in terms of straining and, youknow, existential questions to
be had here that I'm willing tostop about.

Merve Emre (11:34):
I wonder if I could use that to segue to a question
that I had for Annabelle, andthat's a very moving and in
various ways, actually, it's ananecdote that resonates with me
quite a bit. I had twograndparents die from colon
cancer, and so I think a lotabout this as as well. And and,
Annabelle, I guess the questionthat I had for you as I was

(11:57):
reading about fecal universalismwas one of the things you say in
the introduction is thatfecality is what might unite us
and so too does mortality. Weall die. And some psychoanalysts
might say that sexuality is thethird thing that unites us.
So I was wondering if you mightbe able to talk a little bit

(12:17):
about what fecality offers usthat sexuality or mortality
don't. How is fecal universalisma different kind of universalism
than the universalism that weget from either dying or from
or, you know, those two thingsare obviously intimately
interlocked with one anotheranyway. So I was just very

(12:39):
curious to hear you speak aboutthat.

Annabel L. Kim (12:41):
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I'll start with what seems to me
the easier term to account formortality, which is that, well,
obviously, we can't experienceour own deaths. I've never had a
near death experience. All I didalmost drown when I was a a
child, but I don't really have amemory of what it was like to to
feel like I was going to die.
And I've never reallyencountered anybody who has a

(13:02):
near death experience. I've onlyreally ever read about it. But
to me, that doesn't seem to bean experience of mortality. I
think when people come close toexperiencing mortality, it's
very much firmly, obviously,from the perspective of someone
who's come back to life. Thefact that we can never
experience it, that it's alwaysa horizon, it's the piano that's
kind of hovering over our headsand about to fall on us.

(13:23):
It's it's always out of reach ina way that fecality is one of
the most accessible accessiblethings. If anything, it is, you
know, you you stick a baby in aroom that was nothing, and they
will have access to thismaterial, and they can do things
with this material. So I thinkthat there is an immediacy and
there is an undeniability, aninevitability about that you
don't get with mortality, whichpeople are really good at

(13:46):
forestalling, at ignoring, atdenying. I think that the
pandemic has shown that withpeople acting like they're
invincible when clearly they arenot. And in terms of what
distinguishes fecality from fromsexuality, from jouissance, I
mean, I think that there arecertain important similarities,
Internet type jokes where peopletalk about how they would
rather, you know, take a shitthan than have an orgasm, about

(14:08):
the pleasure of defecationcertainly, the release of
defecation, and, you know, agood shit.
There's there are very fewthings that are satisfying or is
kind of releasing, I think, asas a good shit. But I think the
thing about sexuality as opposedto to fecality is that for being
such an embodied thing, itdoesn't really leave you, I

(14:29):
would say, with the same kind ofmaterial reminder of that
experience. Sure, there's likeejaculate both female and male
and sure, you know, for certainsexual practices you can, like,
shit can get involved as well,But it doesn't have the same
kind of form. Fecality issomething where we're creating a
form and it's something wherethe relation is not with

(14:51):
somebody else's body, not withsomebody else's desire, but with
this thing that is of you andnot of you. It gets closer, I
think, at what we try to getwith sexuality, which I think in
some sense is an experience ofsomething that is you but also
not you.

Laure Murat (15:06):
Actually, you you put ficality with sexuality,
with homosexuality. I mean,objection too. And even though
you're demonstrating thatficality works like a pharmacon,
the problem, and it's solvent.And in your book, ficality is
linked to conflict, to death,to, I mean, to many, many

(15:27):
things. I was wondering if youcan elaborate on what makes shit
queer or straight because andespecially in the work of Jean
Genet because you're explainingsomething very interesting there
about the social and the sexualrelated to fecality.
Or perhaps since shit isconcretely universal, as you put

(15:50):
it, how it concretely transcendssexuality and sexual identity.

Annabel L. Kim (15:57):
Yeah. Yeah. No. That that that's a terrific
question. Thank you.
So, you know, with with Janae, Iwas trying to kind of untie,
homosexuality from from fecalitybecause of the way Janae's kind
of fecality is always takenunder the sign of queerness. And
certainly it is queer. I thinkthat nobody could say that
Janet's shit is straight or inthe service of some kind of

(16:19):
straight ideology that ispatently untrue, but that there
is something else like you wereintimating, Dar. There is a
beyond of shit that goes beyondis this straight shit or is this
queer shit, and it is just theshit. But I do think that there
is a difference between, quote,unquote, straight shit and queer
shit.
And I think it kind of points tothe bivalent nature of shit, the

(16:41):
way it represents a polarity.It's the shit as a positive
valence. It's the shit as asignifier of of baseness. And I
would say that straight shit isin the service of what our
intellectual touchstone, ManikVittig, would call the straight
mind. Right?
The ideology of difference, theideology of oppression, of
hierarchy, of imposingnaturalized difference onto

(17:03):
humankind in order to dividethem up ontologically and assign
more or less value or sometimesno value. That kind of shit is
the shit that, as I arguethroughout Kakafumi, refuses to
deal with the materiality ofshit. I think that queer shit
resists the kind of project ofpower of straightness, because I
do think that straightness is,at its core, a project of

(17:24):
domination, it is a system ofpower. So queer shit is is shit
that tries to resist that. But Ithink that beyond the horizon of
queer is where you have thefecal universal, which is this
kind of, I would say, presocialstate.
Materially, regardless of ourposition in life, regardless of
our socioeconomic position, ourour sex, our particular kind of

(17:45):
whatever kind of body we areborn into, we come into it, born
between piss and shit to toSaint Augustine. If we are
delivered vaginally, we arecovered in our mother's shit as
we come out into the world. Evenif we are not born vaginally,
once we are in the world, weshit ourselves, and there's
nothing we can do about it. So Iwould say that that kind of
first state of infant shit,which has nothing to do with the

(18:08):
infant's desire or any kind ofsentience or anything that we
could map on onto what weidentify as being the human,
that's the fecal universal. Insome sense, I guess you could
say that the kind of fecaluniversalism is the return to a
pre kind

Laure Murat (18:23):
of

Annabel L. Kim (18:23):
socialized state of being in the world, but with
the understanding and theperspectives that we can get
after having passed through allthe trials and kind of the
pressures that socialization andwhatever formative experiences
we have give to us.

Rachele Dini (18:40):
Thank you. That was really useful distillation
of one of the things one of theconcepts I was gonna ask you
about. So I have three they'renot provocations, but as I was
reading, I was kept on puttingquestion marks. And the three
questions I have areinterrelated, and they
essentially have to do withuniversalism, particularity, and
abstraction. Particularity, I amnot convinced by your claims

(19:02):
about French literature andinstrumentality.
I absolutely think that theremust be something there, and I'm
just going off of KristenRoss's, Fast Car Clean Bodies,
and there must be something thatone can draw that's the longer
standing than the post war era.But the reasons that you bring
up, I think, are very easilydebunked or countered by any

(19:22):
look at other Roman languages.So I'm Italian, and all of the
expressions that you bring upalso have Italian counterparts.
Vai caccare, fa no caccare, youknow, all of these expressions
that are more or less gross. I Idon't like using somehow.
Saying the shit, I find, isdoesn't bother me. But saying mi
fa cacare, I just think is sovulgar. Right? So there's a kind

(19:45):
of different valence in thedifferent languages. And, you
know, I was just listing offItalian writers that deal with
the same things, JanicelloCalvino, Chisara Creveza, Dante,
obviously.
And so one could either say,okay, all literature deals with
this, which is basically whatSusan Sydney Morrison says, or
one can go into theparticularities. But I wanna see
you just tell me what they arebecause I'm sure that that there

(20:06):
are ones that go back to thekind of imperialist ideas that
you talk about that might haveto do with kind of Western And
Southern Europe and theparticular hierarchies of
belonging and exclusion andsomething about Old Europe and
wanting to make ideas aboutpurity and, and police test that
perhaps, The United States inparticular does away with or

(20:27):
Australia, for instance. Somaybe something that's kind of
distance between the colonies.So, yes, I was gonna ask you
about that. And then relatedlythough is the question of
universalism.
Your some of it now, that isfascinating to me because the
whole time I was reading, I wasthinking, okay. But there is the
original way in which shithappens. Right? But then

(20:49):
everything after that isparticularized, you know, in
terms of class, hormones, timeof the month, country, but also
in the eras. I mean, I kept onwondering what kind of shit
would have been done?
What is the difference betweenthe shit in the nineteen
thirties and the nineteensixties and today? Like dietary

(21:09):
differences in chemicals and,like, climate and environment
and stuff. And theinfrastructure of that kind of
map onto, you know, thisliterature, which I realize is a
completely different project towhat you're doing. But I'd be
really interested to know, youknow, your your opinion about
it.

Annabel L. Kim (21:22):
Okay. Wow. So you've given me a lot to to chew
on. I I really appreciate yourexpanding the framework of
literature beyond the Frenchcontext, which is the only
context that I really have anysort of confidence speaking
about. Again, I wasn't trying tosay that French literature was
exceptionally schetiological.
I think that, you know, clearlyevery literature will have

(21:45):
schetological texts. I I can'tthink of a single literary
tradition where you cannot findsome sort of appearance of
excrement experimentality atsome point or another. And it's
really interesting to me thatthe romance languages would also
share the kind of embeddednessof of the fecal in terms of, you
know, daily speech and idioms.But what does seem to me and,
again, pardon me if this is justmy ignorance of all things

(22:07):
beyond beyond France, but itdoes seem to me that what would
distinguish the French case, soFrench literature from, say,
Italian literature, is theparticular relation that France
has with the idea of theuniversal. So France has very
successfully branded itself aslike, hey.
We're the creators of this ideaof universalism. We're the only

(22:31):
we're the ones to have done atrue universal revolution. You
know, those Americans, oh, sovenal. But we helped them out
anyway because that's the extentof our revolutionary, you know,
brotherhood. And so I think itis the convergence of not just
the percolating permeation offecality into everyday speech,
but the way that the backdropfor that is this idea of the

(22:54):
universal because the two, Ithink, severed from each other
in the French case, which isinteresting.
There is a kind of disavowalhappening there that perhaps is
not the case in in the othercontexts. And then to the second
part of your question, which Iforgot. Sorry. I I I find it
hard to hold on to multiprongedquestions. Sure.

(23:15):
Sure. It was

Rachele Dini (23:16):
it was about as you speak, I'm kind of
understanding better. So I I'mnot sure it's it's as urgent. I
don't know if I'm just beingdifficult here. But how do you
reconcile that notion of thecommonality of shit? The fact
that we all shit.

Annabel L. Kim (23:30):
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Right. Yeah. So to me, all otherstuff that happens after the
kind of fact of fiscality, thatis in the realm of the bad shit,
the realm of shit that servesbad ideology. Going back to what
Laurence was mentioning earlierabout shit as a formicon, I
think it points to how difficultit is for us to hold on to shit

(23:51):
as something that can begenerative, transformative,
egalitarian. Because the momentit's out there, you know, the
way we respond to shit in ourworld is to kind of dig our
heels deeper into inequity.
We've done nothing or close tonothing to improve sanitary
conditions in the poorer partsof of the world. Even though we

(24:13):
know it leads to tens ofthousands of deaths each year
because people suffer fromcholera and diarrhea that they
wouldn't have otherwise if theyhad access to cleaner,
sanitation conditions. We knowthat we're depriving workers of
access to, humane bathroombreaks, and yet we don't do
anything to improve their laborconditions. But, I mean, all of

(24:34):
that is a refusal, I think, toallow shit to be what it could
be. So I guess for me, theproject has a very utopian
component, but I think it's notquite so utopian, you know, or
edenic because it was, this kindof lapsarian, idea of of the
Garden of Eden as, like, aparadisiacal perfect state from

(24:55):
which we can never return.
Every day well, not every daybecause there are lots of
constipated people. So but everyday, virtually everybody has a
bowel movement that producesthis material that if they were
willing to accept it, to dealwith it, to understand it, could
have a a potentiallyrevolutionary sort of effect on

(25:17):
the way we relate to ourselvesand with others. We fail every
day, and we seem to be feelingworse and worse every day. But
to me, that materiality is everyday a new moment of potential.
In some sense, you're seeing thethe glass half empty, and I'm
seeing it half full of of shitshit.

Merve Emre (25:36):
So that takes me to your conclusion. I'm just going
to read from it because I reallylove these lines, and I found
them quite stirring of theheart, not of the bowels. This,
I submit, is why we find shitfrom the beginning of French
literature to its currentmanifestation because literature
against the ceaseless attemptsmade to master it needs to and

(25:58):
desires to be continuallyreminded of its untamable,
uncontainable potential. Thecanon's fecality is the presence
of that potential. And then yougo on to make an argument about
how rather than ending the canonand redistributing prestige, we
redistribute the canon so that aconcrete fecal universalism

(26:23):
would be a communal luxury, thecanon for all.
And I wanted to hear you say alittle bit about how at the risk
of getting us all in trouble,that is a different vision from
how people think about endingthe canon, decolonizing the
canon, all of these contemporaryinstitutional discourses of

(26:46):
canonicity that caca communismis pushing back on, I think, or
trying to expel from from thesacred anal space of literary
study. And I think that links upto your sense that you are
seeing the glass half full ofshit, and it's a glass that, in

(27:08):
fact, you would want to passaround for everyone to imbibe
from.

Annabel L. Kim (27:13):
Yes. I like that kind of almost sort of
Eucharistic image, but not somuch the bread and the wine, but
what the bread and the wine turninto. The conclusion was one
that was not one that I wrote atfirst because I think I was so
informed by and kind ofabsorbing the very anti canon
sort of attitude that permeates,the humanities in this moment. I

(27:37):
was like, we must decolonize or,you know, we must cancel. We
must stop reading these theseatrocious men, these abusers,
these sex pests.
And, you know, I think I thinkthat there is certainly an
argument to be made for that,especially when it comes to
living persons. But I do feellike I mean, this might be a cop
out, but I feel like in the caseof a a very dead person like
Celine, that it doesn't makesense to cancel them anymore,

(28:00):
right, or to, like, to rebukethem or to hold them
accountable. Because I feel likethese attempts at at holding
cultural figures accountable isa kind of optimism really about
getting them to reform, tochange their ways, to no longer
be these horrible people. Andwith texts that exist and with
an that's shut, you know,because the author is no longer
alive, I don't think that thatkind of function really makes

(28:22):
sense anymore. But in the firstiteration of the conclusion that
I wrote, it was a very kind of,we must end the canon, break
things open, shit wants to comeout, etcetera.
And one of my readers for thepress who reviewed the
manuscript I will name namesbecause I'm so grateful to this
person for for having pushedback on me. But Lynn Hofer read
this and was like, thisconclusion doesn't work. Because

(28:46):
she was able to pick up on thefact that what I was writing did
not at all resonate as truth andwas so kind of disconnected from
what this essentially loveletter to the canon I had been
writing in, you know, the allthe pages that led up to it And
was like, this is not you. Thisis not what you actually feel,
and that comes across. And I waslike, oh god.

(29:07):
You're right. I actually do lovethe canon. And so, you know, I
went back to the drawing board,and I was like, okay. Here I
have framed shit as being ableto do all of these things, as
being able to be universal, asbeing able to, like,
democratize, as being able torectify inequality and inequity
in so many different ways, andyet the canon is stands for the

(29:29):
exact opposite of whattechnicality seems to stand for.
So the conclusion as as itcurrently stands is the
conclusion I came to as beingthe honest one of, you know,
maybe we don't have to give upthese pleasures, especially the
canon as something that existsalready that cannot be changed.
The that their authors cannot bereformed, but the texts have a

(29:49):
life beyond that of the author.And clearly, people will
continue to be attached to thecanon. The canon is, despite all
our attempts at decolonizing orreforming our curricula, it's
not gonna go away. But what dowe do with it? And I think that
in some sense, the kind of stopteaching it, replace it attitude
is an impoverishing one becauseit assumes that minoritarian

(30:11):
subjects can only be oppressedby these texts.
What I found from my ownpersonal experience and that of
a lot of my students actually isthat they find reading these
texts to be quite emancipatory,eye opening, able to make them
think in ways that I thinkreading something that would be
more closely aligned with the ormore visibly kind of read as a
minoritarian literature wouldnever allow them to be because

(30:35):
precisely of that intervalbetween their own sort of
identitarian position and thatof the text that they inhabit.
And so I think because of havingexperienced that for myself and
seeing that in my students, Ithought, yeah, the canon can be
redeemed, but the canon can onlybe redeemed if we treat it as
shit is, I think, the kind ofparadox that I've come to.

Rachele Dini (30:55):
I feel like I'm translating a lot of what you're
saying. Despite having grown upbetween The US and Italy, I feel
very distant from from all ofthis by virtue of not being in
US academia. I don't know ifintentionally or not given that
you're you're interested in thelanguage of sanitization, but a
lot of the words that you used,Annabelle, to talk about this,
you have to do you know, notapart from canceling, which is
itself a very draconian term,but eliminate and, and erase and

(31:18):
forget it, blah blah blah, seemsto suggest that there's either
we keep the canon and read itacross, you know, through
different lenses, which isextremely productive as your
book attest, or we throw themall of these writers away. And I
guess both of those approachesassume that one has to have a
canon and that one has to kindof think in terms of those

(31:40):
critical traditions in the firstplace. And apart from the fact
that I think there's a certainutopia to dismantling the canon
and saying, you know, I love,Cezar.
I love Celine. And I want tokeep on reading them, but I
don't want to, you know, readthem in relation to the way that
they have been historically usedas as you mentioned. But also,
you know, read these otherwriters. And I suppose that what

(32:00):
I guess, I think that you'regetting at this, but I can't
quite tell because again of thisthis language that seems very
polarized, is that there seemsto me to be something that's
that we're not getting away fromthe institutional and the kind
of professional aspect of theway we we talk about these
subjects. As in the question ofcancellation or of, you know,

(32:21):
decolonizing or whatever seemsto always going back to the
syllabus and the institutionsthemselves seeming, you know,
removing themselves from fromcolonialism, etcetera.
On the one hand, we talk aboutthese things as academics who
are hired by universities andwho have to keep on pumping out
publications that stand us outas excellent, etcetera, within
an academic discourse that isinherently capitalistic. And on

(32:43):
the other hand, there's actualcapacity for, you know, utopian
rethinking of literature. AndI'm wondering if those two
things can be decoupled, youknow, and if that's inherently
what you're suggesting, Adele.

Annabel L. Kim (32:54):
I love that. I definitely have have thoughts on
that. But, Laura, I I'd beinterested to to hear your
question as well.

Laure Murat (33:01):
I just wanted to go back just very quickly to French
universalism because, actually,I had the same questions as you.
It basically, I I was wonderingto what extent French
specificities are French. Frenchuniversalism has specificities,
namely secularism and colorblindness. How does that apply

(33:25):
to the concrete universalismyou're offering with fecality?
That can be a question.
But also, would it be possibleto apply this concrete
universalism that I'munderstanding as a materialist
critique of literature ingeneral? Could we apply it to

(33:46):
American literature certainly?And while I was reading,
Cacophony, I couldn't helpthinking about Patrimony by
Philip Roth, where the authorexplains that the only legacy of
his father was shit, the one theson has to clean when the father
was sick. So that, you know,brings us back to Raquel's story

(34:10):
at the beginning.

Annabel L. Kim (34:12):
I do think that this kind of fecal universalism
that is derived from the Frenchliterary tradition can be
applied to to any kind ofliterary text, because the
experience that Ficality mapsonto or that, you know, the
reference for Ficality issomething that we all have
access to regardless of ourhistorical national, social

(34:35):
position. And I think that thekind of significance that I'm
trying to attribute to fecalityis one that is, you know, trans
historical, transcultural, thatis truly universal in that
regard. And yes, you know, theFrench universalism with its
very particular elaboration assomething that is secular, as

(34:57):
something that is that iscolorblind, the abstract
universalism has its origins inthe French enlightenment, in the
French revolution. I thinkthat's a unambitious
conceptualization ofuniversalism. So I think one of
the arguments that I'm trying tomake in the book is that in
fact, the French thinkers, thephilosophers, the state makers,

(35:20):
they were so much moreconstrained in their thought
than writers.
That because French writers wereable to, I think, conceive of
shit as a material thing, akinto language as a material sort
of universal thing, that theywere able to go much further
with pushing the idea of a realuniversal than the French
thinkers.

Laure Murat (35:40):
Thank you, Annabelle. I just want to add
something also that that struckme is that if I'm not getting
wrong, almost none of theauthors are could be considered
as universalist in the Frenchway. That's interesting too. And
that could be an argument foryou, of course.

Annabel L. Kim (35:58):
Yes. Absolutely. Thank you. This is a gift. Yeah,
because, you know, once the shitis out there, like, it's no
longer out of you can't put itback inside the body, like,
despite, you know, the poopingback and forth fantasy of of of
Robbie and you me, you, andeveryone we know.
And once it's out there, it'sout there, and it kinda belongs
to the world.

Laure Murat (36:18):
That would be interesting to ask to Angahita,
for instance. Where is she, youknow, positioned herself
regarding French universalism?

Annabel L. Kim (36:27):
Oh, like, completely, like, against it.
Anti anti French universe. Andso I am, you know, kind of doing
a perverse reading of of ofGarita by I've always done kind
of perverse reading of Garita byrecuperating her anti universal
work for the universal. I didhave, like, two cents about
Raquel's question about theinstitutional because I think
you're absolutely right thatthere is, subtending the book

(36:50):
and the conclusion, especially,this desire to decouple the
institution from the way we canencounter literature. Part of my
conviction of this comes fromthe fact that we are all seeing
across the world the materialconditions for the kind of work
we do in higher education beinggutted every day, right?

(37:10):
Faced with increasing kinds ofausterity measures, redundancy
measures, you know, make morebricks without straw, attract
all the students, do all thework without the support that we
need. I'm always surprised byhow few, American students go to
college because I think thatthere's a way, culturally
speaking, that it seems like akind of the default American

(37:32):
experience. You graduate fromhigh school, you go on to
college, and that's what peopledo. And actually, that's not
what most people do. I'm alittle bit of an I'm attached to
elite things, but not in orderto be elitist.
And perhaps this makes meelitist to be as attracted to an
anecdote that Natalie Salut oncetold of, you know, who knows if
it's true, of going to Moscowand seeing on the Moscow metro

(37:53):
these, you know, proletarians,these workers reading Balzac.
But I for me, that's the dream.Why have we come to disrespect
poor people, uneducated peopleso much to think that they don't
have the intellectual acumen tobe able to read difficult texts.
I think that's insulting. Thesite in which we must cultivate

(38:14):
a love of literature isincreasingly not inside the
institution.
I think we see that as we seestudents kind of, like,
enrollments bleeding, especiallyin foreign literature like
French. Students no longer takethese classes. They're driven by
material concerns, marketconcerns, pragmatic concerns. So
given how little we're doing interms of the classroom in terms
of forming readers, and I thinkthe work we're doing is

(38:36):
important, don't get me wrong,and I think there should be more
support for it, not less. But,you know, if we're going to be
forming a generation of readers,it's really not going to happen
in the classroom.
As to how we do that outside,you know, the institution, I
don't know. I really don't know.But I think that it can be done
because of, you know, shitexceeds, and we see that. And I

(38:57):
think it must be done, and Iwill let people who were much
more equipped to know how to dothat Tell me how how to do that.
But I think that's theimperative that we're facing.
Absolutely.

Rachele Dini (39:08):
So I take your point about it being insulting
to to suggest that certaindemographics, can't read. I
think that what's what's veryinteresting this I mean, I'll
call it interesting. It'sdevastating. What's interesting
about this devastating moment inwhich, departments are being
closed, I was telling you guysearlier, my I've been put on
notice of risk of redundancy ashave all my colleagues, in

(39:29):
English creative writing,philosophy, world classics have
been removed, linguistics isgone, is that on the one hand,
you have these decolonizingefforts, okay, however we wanna
call them, the institutionalones. You have the creation of
these new courses.
This isn't UK. The US is is farahead, in that respect, that
are, you know, rediscoveringwriters, that have been

(39:49):
marginalized or forgotten. Youhave these new approaches to
reading canonical texts the waythat you have done at many
others, you know, in order toexcavate other, you know,
feminist and critical racemeanings. And it is as that work
is being done, it has exactlycoincided with the assault on
universities, particularly theones where that work is being

(40:12):
done. So in The UK, Oxford isfine.
The Russell Group is fine. Theyhave their own funds. It's the
post 92 universities, which forthose of you who aren't in The
UK, are the universities thatessentially cater to the
disadvantaged, generallyimmigrant and people of color.
Those are the ones that areunder assault with the
implication that the students inthese demographics cannot read

(40:34):
those texts. And so in a way, wecome back to you know, so what
Annabelle is saying about itbeing insulting to suggest that
the these people in quotationmarks can only read these other
texts and cannot read these onesis actually also being leveled
by by the right.
You know? And in amongst that,there is that notion that that

(40:57):
you are, you know, constantlytrying to push against,
Annabelle, of the the notionthat shit is something to which
we are reduced as opposed tosomething in which we might swim
and bask and, you know, berebirthed in. There's an
interesting connection betweenthose polarities, and I find it
fascinating and devastating thatthey're actually collapsing into
each other.

Merve Emre (41:17):
I take Annabelle to be saying something similar to
what Marx says in the Germanideology, which is that,
ideally, we would all be bothproducers and consumers of shit.
And if we democratize the sphereof production and consumption
for shit, then we would live ina world in which we could make

(41:39):
judgments about the canon thatwere purely symbolic judgments
as opposed to judgments in whichour economic livelihoods were
tied up in. So I take that to bethe kind of utopian horizon to
which you aspire that if wethink of literature as shit, as

(42:00):
encoding shit that is the otherof the useful, that is waste,
that is excess, then what wewant to imagine is a world in
which we can all produce andconsume that waste, that excess,
that shit, and that we candiscriminate, in fact, among
different forms and varieties ofshit. You might like a stringy

(42:22):
shit. I might like a solid shit.
And that signify other thananything other than the symbolic
form itself. Right? It doesn'thave to indite something about
our diet, our class status,etcetera, etcetera. Can I switch
the conversation? Of course.
I I just really wanna talk aboutfarts. I really want to talk

(42:42):
about your chapter on Beckett,on Malloy and flatulence and the
mimetic impulse. I felt like thequibble that I had as I was
reading, and this is on page 89.The quibble that I had came when
you wrote, the flatulent cloudthat surrounds Malloy is thus a

(43:03):
sign pointing toward the silenceas the space for the real stuff.
And you go on to talk about theimmateriality of the fart.
And I started wondering aboutwhether the fart is really
immaterial or not. And I wasthinking about that kind of
comedy sketch where two peopleare standing in an elevator, and

(43:24):
one person farts, and the otherperson sniffs it. And the person
who farted turns to the personwho sniffed it and says, it was
you. And I was thinking aboutthe materiality of odor and the
sociality of odor, which is if Ithink back to the story that I
told about the woman who lefther constipated shit on that

(43:46):
man's kitchen counter. Thatobviously is not the same as the
materiality or the sociality ofthe fart, but that's not to say
that the fart is immaterial orthat it does not instantiate a
kind of relationality.
And so I wanted to ask you aboutthat, but but really to bring
that question of theimmateriality versus the

(44:08):
materiality of the fart to thisquestion of the immateriality
versus the materiality oflanguage. Is language more of a
shit? Is it more of a fart? Isit more of a shart, I e
something in between? Where dowe locate language along this
material immaterial axis if partof what you want to do is push

(44:29):
back against Bart's claim thatwhen we write shit, it doesn't
have an odor.

Annabel L. Kim (44:34):
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I think you're pointing to the
way I kinda conflate materialitywith form because I think it's
so much easier to you know, yousee a turd. You know, even with,
diarrhea, if you didn't dodiarrhea into the toilet bowl
until, like, which where it justkind of combines with whatever
water. But if you did diarrheaand onto, like, the ground, you
would be able to see an end tothe pot like, to the puddle of

(44:56):
of liquid.
It would still have a form.Contours, the fart just doesn't
have because the fart, it's not,like, completely immaterial.
Obviously, you know, there arethese odor molecules whether or
not we want them to, otherpeople can smell and then, you
know, blame us for. But itdoesn't have a form in the same
way because the fart just kindakeeps on expanding. It is

(45:19):
endless expansion, whereas theturd or any kind of variation of
the turd is finite, and you cansee where it begins and ends.
And I think that's the keydifference. I do have some
thoughts in the relational, butto me, that seems a way of kind
of getting at your reallyinteresting question about,
like, okay, what's the relationbetween language and the fart or
the shart and shit? And I thinkI think it's the spectrum. I

(45:41):
think that there are authors whowrite in this kind of expansive,
way that strive toward the theinfinite in some in some sense.
You have the authors who Ithink, you know, like Angarita
and and and Janae, I would say,who are very much dealing with
language as being this physicalviscous shit.
And I think that with BeckettBeckett, I think, is is closer
to the shark, kind of notwanting to choose one or the

(46:02):
other and sort of just wantingto just kind of stay in the
portal of being that is the anuswhere you don't have to
differentiate between the two.But the relationality of and the
sociality of the fart now thatis so interesting because I do
think there is something so muchmore embarrassing about farting
in public than if you were toshit yourself in public. I don't

(46:23):
know. I mean, this is just me.Like, what would you choose?
I think some people might chooseto shit themselves because of
being able to pass incognito,unperceived, and then you just
kind of, like, rush off to,like, the nearest bathroom and
try to take to deal with it. Butit's the way the fort, I think,
makes you into an object ofattention that gets, I think,
at, like, the violence ofsociality. With ficality, you

(46:46):
know, unless you're a kind ofexhibitionist who likes to
defecate in public, you're notparticipating in that kind of
attention economy in the sameway. You know, there's a in Ray
Chow's latest book, she has avery interesting chapter on
Foucault and an in confessionand, like, what she calls the
smart self, which is the self inthe age of social media and this
contemporary attention economy.But she, I think, describes our

(47:08):
moment as one of, like, selfaffirmation run amok.
As much as we're in an epoch of,like, self affirmation run amok
where we all want to be seen, Ithink that there is just a
stronger desire to not be seen,and that's what the fart doesn't
allow us

Rachele Dini (47:22):
to have. I think that there's so much now that
people want to be seen as partof the whole economy of self
improvement that, you know,videos about how to sit on the
toilet and how best to, youknow, and what to consume before
that and what kind of apparatusand, of course, the technology.
Right? You know, theseincredibly expensive toilets
with all the the massage thingon them. You know, all all of

(47:44):
this, you know, the the way thatthat shitting itself has been
commodified, in a way that Ithink Beckett in particular
would have found extraordinarilyfunny, but also utterly
predictable.
I'm I'm getting so carried awayby these ideas. And then I go
back to the points that Anibalmakes in the introduction about
not wanting to go intoabstraction and wanting to stay

(48:05):
on the material. And I thinkabout my own students when they
kind of get lost in whatever I'msaying, and they're like, how
does this relate to anythingreal? What are you talking
about? And I'm thinking aboutthe way in which, the academy is
seen from the outside as beingfully in abstractions.
Right? And so the tensionbetween the fascinating ways in
which we're philosophizing andthen how that almost that

(48:27):
essentially becomes also a aform of abstraction. Right?
Because we're not actuallytalking about real shit. We
don't have our hands in shit.
We are talking metaphorically inthe end. So aren't we in the end
doing what the critics thatyou've kind of put yourself in
opposition to are doing in thefirst place? How do you get away
from that?

Annabel L. Kim (48:46):
Well, I would say, you know, a turning point
for when I wrote this bookinvolved Venice carnival, the
weekend, no plumbers around, aseptic tank system that was at
capacity and the water pressuredidn't work, and a toilet fold
with the feces of threedifferent people that I ended up
having to manually unclog. And Ireally didn't want to, but I was
the only person in that spacewho worked on shit. And so I was

(49:08):
elected to be the person to dealwith it. That was the moment
where I realized, you know, todistinguish between my shit and
anyone else's shit is socompletely useless. And then to
actually confront, like, thekind of weird slipperiness of
shit, like, it is superslippery.
Like, I don't think anythingprepares you for that. And I
know that, you know, parentschanging diapers have to deal

(49:28):
with their children's shit allthe time, but it's not like
they're receiving theirchildren's turd, like, fully
formed in their hand and the waythe diaper smooshes it up
against the skin. That destroys,I think, the experience of what
it is to handle, like, shit. Ornot destroys, but it distorts
it, in an important way. So forme, one once I had that
experience, like, something kindof clicked in my head, and I was
like, This is what Celine iswriting about.

(49:50):
This is what Celine'sgrandmother was doing, and all
of a sudden I understood. So forme, it was not an abstract
thing. And this is not aprescription that I make
explicitly in the book at all,but I will make it now is I
think that everyone shouldhandle a human turd because
there is something about theconfrontation and experience of

(50:11):
that that I think is istransformative. So, you know,
maybe people will read Cacafoneand be like, okay. This is
abstract.
But, hopefully, it willencourage a handful of readers
to go out and handle shit. Iwould love that. I think we all
need to handle shit. And, youknow, love, the fact that Phoebe
defecates three times a day,wow, that's that's that's that's

(50:32):
astounding.

Laure Murat (50:33):
I know. I know. I can I can go on and describe the
the poop, but, you know, I justwant make to to to make two
comments, very, very quickcomments? First, I think,
Beckett took the the forkbecause Joyce took the shit.
Remember remember, Leopold Bloomon his toilet.
I mean, that's justunsurpassable. The second thing,

(50:57):
just a reference, you probablyknow it. But between the
concrete and the abstract andthe toilets and the sheet, there
is a a movie by Alain Renecalled Providance. And
Providence is about a writerwho's writing a book on his
toilet. Do you know that inFrench in French, the toilet, we

(51:18):
call it the throne.
Okay? So he was the king was onon on on the throne, and he is
imagining his next book. Thewhole movie is about I think
it's John Gielgud, the thefamous British actor, that is on
the toilet imagining his, youknow, novel, and he sees in

(51:39):
front of him everything heimagines on the throne. So I
think you have the resolutionhere.

Annabel L. Kim (51:45):
That's perfect. Isn't that the

Rachele Dini (51:48):
the Martin Amis novel that starts with adulthood
and then goes all the way backto shit? Do you know what I'm
talking about? Am I

Merve Emre (51:55):
No. I was thinking I was thinking about Ulysses also
and about the scene of Bloomwiping his ass on the newspaper
that he has been reading and howon that newspaper is a kind of
sentimental story that a man haswritten and how he's thinking, I
could do better as he's wipinghis ass with that piece of

(52:17):
newspaper and how he fartsthroughout the novel. But I
think the most memorable fart inthat novel belongs to Molly
Bloom and how I like thatBeckett is latching on to both
of them in a sense by fartingbecause Joyce Shatt, but also
Molly Bloom becomes theepicenter of the flatulence in
Ulysses.

Annabel L. Kim (52:38):
I think the association between newspapers
and wiping is so interestingbecause the newspaper is at its
core also the daily. It'srepetition. It's the paper that
makes the most sense.

Merve Emre (52:49):
Annabelle, I had another question for you. On
this point about the abstractand the concrete, surely that's
one reason why you use the wordshit. Because there's something
about the word shit that seemsto mediate or that seems to be
dialectically involved in thenegotiation between the abstract

(53:10):
and the concrete. And I justwonder if you could talk more
about your insistence on shitand how it perhaps answers that
concern or answers that questionof how is it that we can bring
academic theorization back tothe level of what it is that we

(53:30):
sit and do on our toilets once aday if you're eating your
vegetables properly.

Annabel L. Kim (53:37):
Yeah. You know, you're absolutely right. If I
insist on shit, it's because mywriters insist on shit when they
write their shit. They're notchoosing pure abstraction by,
you know, talking about loss orelimination, and they're not
insisting on the purely concreteby talking about their feces or
their fecal matter. But they'retalking about merde, which is

(53:58):
shit and is the convergence, Ithink, of the concrete with the
abstract.
One of the chapters, my pinacchapter was originally published
as a article in a in a Britishjournal, French studies. And I
had a hell of a time with thethe editing process because the
editors who were wonderful, theywere really wonderful to work
with. You know, they're veryBritish and, really, we're,

(54:19):
like, we're counting how often Iuse the word shit, and we went
back and forth. I went throughmultiple rounds of having to
clean up my language becausethey're like, there's still,
like, one shit for every 500words that's still too frequent.
You don't need this for yourargument.
And I tried to, you know,protest, but I I do need it for
my argument, but they would havenone of it. Thankfully, I was
able to put it all back in thebook version because I do think

(54:41):
shit is what reminds us thatshit is a bivalent thing. It is
concrete. It is abstract. It islike light in that matter.
And, you know, going back toWittig and Wittig's Ars Poetica
de Chantilly d'Hitteraire, theliterary worksite, where Wittig
basically, you know, theorizesliterature as labor and language
as being dual natured, likelight. So shit is like language

(55:05):
in that regard. It is concrete.It is abstract. It is workable.
It can be worked with. And, youknow, to go back to what you
were saying, Murbe, about thiskind of Marxist dream of being a
producer and a consumer, Like, Ithink the shit is also an
invitation for us all to becomeworkers of shit, producers of
shit, consumers of shit, to workwith it, to enjoy the fruits

(55:26):
which shit can produce, thefruits of our literary labors,
of our bodily labors too. Thankyou again so much. Like, my
brain is so happy. I feel soreplete and satisfied.
Thank you for being suchwonderful readers and such smart
readers. I've expanded myarchives. I've I've expanded my
brain thanks to you. So thankyou so much, everybody.