Merda, potere e verità (da San Francesco a Wat)

On the grounds of crucial theoretical frameworks (provided by Christian Enzensberger, Francesco Orlando, Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas and others) and by referring to a wide range of literary and artistic examples (Saint Francis, Dario Fo, Tommaso Stigliani, Pina Bausch, Tadeusz Kantor, Simone Cristicchi, Dante, the Comedy of Art, Alfred Jarry, Victor Hugo, Pasolini, Duchamp, Piero Manzoni, Thomas Mann, Sandro Penna and many others), the author argues that all great art is excrementitious and at the same time political: it articulates a satire of the ugliness of the world, a free song coming de profundis, from the bowels, from suffering, loneliness, bewilderment, fear and dizziness: from that state that Dante and Kantor would equate to finding ourselves “between eternity and garbage”. Accordingly, the final part of this essay is devoted to the significance of shit in the prison memoirs of the Polish writer Aleksander Wat, where the act and the place of defecation cause a painful and at the same time liberating “return of the repressed”, from the sexual, the sentimental and the political point of view. Art and literature have long rediscovered and re-established their own royalty, sacredness and truth by having to acknowledge the need of passing through the rubble, waste and shit of history – a need that has become stronger after Auschwitz and Kolyma.