LEO BERSANI
443
repetition, and death. . 'Caca is the matter of the soul," Artaud profoundly
writes from Rodez. Given Artaud 's terror of the anus and his revulsion with
birth, this astonishing formula is, I think , a condensed way of afftrming that
excremental droppings are inevitably-and, in one sense, rightly-associated
with that" dropping away" from the mother which marks the birth of an in–
dividual soul. The connection between the two is by no means only a "sick"
confusion between two fundamentally different biological operations . It's
obvious that in its pathological form, a fantasy equivalence of birth with de–
fecation involves confusing the vagina and the anus and a live infant with
fecal matter. But the very real analogies between the two phenomena are
perhaps more interesting. Giving birth and moving one's bowels are both
concrete illustrations of that ..miracle" -which in fact is a commonplace in
the evolutionary scale from the unicellular organism to man-by which one
substance becomes two substances . In both processes, being separates from
itself.
Now in birth what is separated from the parent organism is new life;
in
defecation, it is of course merely waste matter which the body can neither
destroy nor use. The latter process, while it in fact demonstrates both the
living economy of the body and the indestructibility of matter , comes none–
theless to be interpreted, especially in the child's fantasies, as a daily mani–
festation of the body's tendency
to
die.
It
is as if our body were continuously
evacuating part of itself, transforming its living cells into dead waste. Artaud
remains faithful to the child's view of fecal matter as a loss of life, as evidence
of the mysterious amputation of its own living substance on the part of the
body. In this fantasy the feces are the visible, externalized form of the body's
death while we are still alive. But to be separated from my mother's body is
also a form of death. Birth "condemns" me to individual life, and there–
fore to death; the beginning of a new life is of course also the promise of a
new death. The crude physical analogies between birth and defecation-they
are both, as it were, evacuations from below-are therefore reinforced by
another, more essential, similarity: both evacuations seem
to
announce death.
It
is, very precisely, my " falling away" from another self which, by giving
me individual life, makes my death inevitable. And in defecation my live
body appears to illustrate its afftnity with death throughout my life . Thus,
to the extent that it is the nature of an individual soul to have the awesome
privilege of an individual death, the fate of the soul is prefigured in the
body's daily "condemnation" of a part of its own contents as unusable
waste. In a sense, the matter of the soul is indeed " caca," and the anus is ,
conversely, a principle of spiritual terror : to feel the body 's waste pass
through the anus and to see that waste is to witness a decompositon (a sep–
aration of matter from life) to which another passing through or dropping
away originally and irrevocably doomed us.
