Smith 1 The Hygienealogy of Offals: The Biopolitics of Sanitation A return to the hermeneutics of suspicion In order to be critical of the state

of things today, in regards to sanitation and its ambivalent practices on the production of subjectivity, knowledge, and the proper, we need to return to the critics that set forth hermeneutics of suspicion. In lieu of a scatological pun, Paul Ricoeurs famous thesis regarding Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as critics of modernitys discontinuities and participatory nature1 would suffice here to regard the method and monster we wish to unleash today. Firstly, Marx: the project of communism and its manifesto envisioned a propertyless society. Marx, alongside Engels, recite the following incantation in the Manifesto: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.2 From here, we see immediately, the goal of communism: to remove the very foundations that have set up the real, material conditions of life and to make man free from these property lines. The ruling ideas of society are the ruling force that dictate the mode of production3 and for that, Marx and Engels point to the bourgeoisie as being the prime benefactor of producing, and appropriating from labor, the material conditions that people live in the day-to-day. However, as we see with Nietzsche, this is not necessarily the case. History is not ruled by the ruling class or ruling ideas, but by the fact that people participate in upholding the power relations. In The Birth of Tragedy, we see two contrasting forms of artwork: Apollonian, distinguished by its reasoning, order, and justice; and Dionysian, the intoxicated, uncontrolled, chaotic drives that cause injustice. Nietzsche sees that modernity prefers the Apollonian sensibility, of maintaining order, but all the while alienates the viewer, not by class position, but by distance to accessing the unmasking of the sublime, which, in turn, separates the self-connection of the viewer. For this, Nietzsche prefers the Dionysian inclusivity to access of the sublime, but realizes the harmony between the Apollonian-Dionysian relationship: the order and chaos, to fall
1 2

Cf. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (1977) Ch.1 of The Communist Manifesto 3 Cf. The German Ideology (1998)

Smith 2 back on order. This latter part is evident in The Genealogy of Morals. There is the systemic history that is organized on ideas and its relationship of topology-typology. This metaphorical relationship has much to do with the deep shit that we encountered with Mary Douglas above. If it becomes so deeply embedded, it is supposedly true for all cases. Nietzsche then maps a genealogy of morals, a straining history that deals with appropriation of values that have consistently remained the case in culture. If we were to deviate from these Apollonian calls for justice and order, we would fall into chaos and thus have to be tried for our actions. And it is not only from secular enlightenment, but Christendom, Roman, and Greek values that have made it thus far into the then-present time period. Contrary to the master-slave dialectic found influenced by Hegel in Marx and Engels, Nietzsche states directly that even the master is a slave, and for this we should be careful with our habits: Man has looked for so long with an evil eye upon his natural inclinations that they have finally become inseparable from bad conscience. A converse effort can be imagined, but who has the strength for it? It would consist of associating all the unnatural inclinationsthe longing for what is unworldly, opposed to the senses, to instinct, to nature, to the animal in us, all the anti-biological and earthculminating idealswith bad conscience. [] But how kind and accommodating the world becomes the moment we act like all the rest and let ourselves go!4 But, if we were to continue along that passage, we will find that Nietzsche is in recommendation for not just any health, superb health, cured from the sickness that has plagued as a genealogy of its own. Finally, Freud deals with another level of psychology when it deals with the large scale of society. To slight contrast of popular readings of the father of psychoanalysis5 Freud draws heavily on not so much the psyche, but rather the materialization of spirituality in society.6 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the notions of pleasure come to from Eros, the provided substitute for this instinct towards perfection whose existence we cannot admit,7 and Anankhe, a sublime submission that leads us back to Eros. It is the death drives, later to be known as Thanatos, that manifests and attributes the fear of losing Eros, and Freud writes:
4 5

Essay 2, XXIV No pun intended. 6 Cf. Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Mans Soul (1983). 7 Freud, p.51

Smith 3 Death is rather a matter of expediency, a manifestation of adaptation to the external conditions of life; for, when once the cells of the body have been divided into soma and germplasm, an unlimited duration of individual life would become a quite pointless luxury.8 The logos of biology becomes an analogy of spirituality to provide for the survival of the species in a constant battle for life. Eros is tied to sexuality, and civilization utilizes sexuality to care for the survival of a species in the service of Eros. These spiritualizations become quite natural instincts to Freud, and is seen as a struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.9 With this, we see that civilization has much to do sexualitys survival, rather than civilization, which is an offshoot of sexuality. Death drives constitute the chaos, or darkness, against the three principles of civilization: cleanliness, order, and beauty.10 These are ideals to strive for in the process of becoming spiritual with our civilization, and if we do not follow the footsteps of sexuality, we are killing the totality of our race. What do these three critics of modernity have in common? Besides being the aforementioned hermeneutics of suspicion, they all take into consideration the notion of proper. For Marx: the proper is that of property and reality; for Nietzsche: the proper is that of truth and access; and for Freud: the proper is that of necessity and sexuality. The importance of incorporating Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is to undertake their methodologies towards understanding the historiography, materialization, and disciplinary action of sanitation itself. In my previous essay, I outlined the darkness of waste outside of the human. In this essay, I wish to forgo an historical account of sanitation processes, and the process of History as an agent of sanitation, to which we can call sanitation-as-metaphor. This methodology (or the monster to which History must be afraid of) is known as hygienealogy: the traces of absolute filth that have been kept today in processes of sanitation, ultimately leading to the sanitation of sanitation itself.
8 9

Ibid, p.55 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p.119 10 Ibid, see chapters 3 and 4

Smith 4 If we are to dispel of the proper in all the three critics perspectives, we would be lead down a road of no return, and, most likely, there is a danger of the impossible and monstrous things that may come about. Hygienealogy is a radical ungrounding of the virtuality of waste. As Deleuze and Guattari would say about nomadic thought as antiHistory: To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is of no importance whether one says I.11 It is this removal of importance of the proper that needs to be addressed not only on the level of cleanliness, purity, beauty, and order, but of subjectivity. Sanitation Processes and Sanitation-as-metaphor If we are to look at a direct definition of sanitation, we will see that the etymology comes from the Latin sanus, meaning healthy. This is also found in the word sanity, a mentally sound state with rational undertakings. Sanitation deals with the hygiene of the body, whether political, individual or collective. Some common practices of sanitation have much to do with recycling, waste management, cleaning, or making room for sustainable ethics. All of these processes have their own origin points in history, their methods of dealing with waste, and the policies and regulations that people have to follow to lead a healthy life. A sign at the Staten Island ferry terminal states the following: Feed a pigeon, breed a rat. The connotation of rats as analogous to unhygienic has its history as a disease carrier (i.e. the Bubonic Plague). Sanitation is a participatory apparatus that does not want to see our life in danger, and for that, we must dispel any waste, not just from sight, but because we are disgusted from being sick again. Sanitation processes also follow suit as a biopolitical formulation. Biopolitics, defined, is the right to life, an ambivalent proposition to democratize the survival of the population after the sovereigns fall, or, in other words, the materialization of humanization. Michel Foucault12 sees biopolitics being formulated through biopower, an apparatus developed through modern capitalism that is participated by the population at

11 12

A Thousand Plateaus, Rhizome Cf. History of Sexuality vol. 1 (1978)

Smith 5 large that enables regulations, policies, and, ultimately what is considered to be panoptic.13 We will see more that sanitation is moreso an economic activity than it is a political one. If waste exists, it exists as a surplus of material that is not needed or has to be thrown away for its unutility. There may be a danger to using that material: if it is unhygienic, it may hurt our health; if it is in the way, it may impede our progress; if it reeks, we may vomit. As Dominique Laporte analyzes, where shit once was, gold shall be.14 Sanitation, as Ive mentioned above, can also be used as a metaphor, distinguishing processes and acts that have made way for that goldness to be in place. Several instances these days can be applied: white-washing histories that have become incorporated into History; colonial and imperial practices of appropriating arche-cultures into cultures; or, even the intellectual elitism that predicates a specific access point of what is considered right or wrong in the academic world. It is not so much the attitude that drives this, but the economic excess that is cast(e) out from visibility and the masking of the base in the superstructure. An example of this will be taken from a contemporary artist, Etienne Turpin. In 2013, Turpin, a Canadian artist worked on an exhibition entitled Stainlessness, examining the labor histories of four North American cities: Sudbury, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. What could be described as a geology of offals in Turpins work takes place: utilizing an architectural technique known as capriccio, he layers the almost filthy mapping of labor being hidden away by the construction of the city and the wiping away of natural land. However, this is not the most important part of this work: Turpin screenprints these works of capriccio onto stainless steel. Stainlessness is a work to be reckoned with as an analysis of sanitation-asmetaphor. Walter Benjamin says that not even the dead will be safe,15 and the dead can be extended from that of the labor movements and the appropriation of the land that was humanized, the excess of the base that upholds the superstructure. Turpin does a very
13

Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977): panoptic, means, visible to all within, a democratic apparatus of power that enables everyone within an episteme to see and be part of surveillance. 14 Cf The History of Shit (2000) 15 On the Concept of History, thesis VI (1940)

Smith 6 good job at composing a hygienealogy and extending it to the geological framing of history. We will do our best to compose a hygienealogy that is set up historically beyond the drilling of the earth, but the drilling and violent composition of subjectivity. It is here that we begin mapping where sanitation processes and sanitation of History began, and where the most ultimate form can be found. We shall discuss how Man himself has become Homo Cloaca: the cleansed man. If we are to begin with the Book of Leviticus, so be it. We are to find that, ultimately, the most sanitized and purified realm is that of the fascists of Nazi Germany, who sought two extremes of the proper: ultra-nationalist, protectionist, and largely restrictive economy (property); xenophobic, segregative, and preservation of the Aryan race (cleanliness). The length of time between Leviticus and the Nazis is quite a distance, but nonetheless an important narrative of where sanitation processes and sanitation-as-metaphor meet. We then are lead to question if globalization and neoliberal economics are, in fact, continuing these processes. Be Ye Holy, Be Ye Separate: The Book of Leviticus Returning to Mary Douglas, we can see that the Book of Leviticus is one of the origins of the binary between the clean and the dirty. The order of the chapters in the Book are structured around sacrifices to God, the consecration to priesthood, uncleanliness, and the Holiness code. What is interesting to note is that the title of Leviticus is actually from the Greek translation meaning relating to the Levites, a nomadic tribe that was later lead by both Moses and Aaron. However, the Hebrew, Vayikral Wayikra, means, And He called. The difference in the title should not be taken as a direct appropriation by the Greeks to refer to only the Levites, but to the rather prophetic activity of Moses delivering the order of God and His roles of Holiness to develop a community of holy man. This calling of God sets up an economy of privileged communication to God, to follow blessing and not curse. This communication becomes a ritual that is tied to God, to uphold the servitude of the world and humankind to God. Sacrifice, itself, plays a part in this ritualistic attitude. With Genesis, we see that Adam and Eve are not given permission to eat in the Garden of Eden; when that happens humankind falls from grace to develop Original Sin. After the Flood, when Noah saves the animals, God gives permission to the humans to

Smith 7 eat animals without fear of punishment, although the requisite is that you sacrifice to God. These sacrifices would then produce the sacred from the everyday.16 In Leviticus after Moses is called by God, the prophet makes aware that sacrifice is only to be offered by priests, who become holy. The goal now is to understand how to be a priest. To God, a priest is one that produces a sacrifice of a good smell. As a sign of punishment of producing a bad smell to God, He destroys the two sons of Aaron. Sacrifices must be read, then, as a holy offering of pure incense, rather than polluted. This pollution threatens Holiness, the sacred tie to God, and to become a priest is to uphold the good odor of the world. The odor of things, therefore, are found not only in the sacrificial practices, but observing the roles of diet, sexuality and sexual behavior, property, and observance of holy days like the Sabbath. If the Levite were to fall into sin by producing foulness into the world, the only true outcome is that God will move away from them; the only way to keep God from leaving is to purify consistently. To be Holy, then, is to be separated from the impure. The repeated phrase of Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy, is a sign that shows to be Holy is to follow Gods Word and to separate the self of Gods image from that which is not in Gods image. Dietetics and Greek askesis Foucault17observes that the Greeks implemented their own form of economy of purity and health with dietetics. It was not necessarily a sexual dietetics, but to define the use of pleasureswhich conditions were favorable, which practice was recommended, which rarefaction was necessaryin terms of a certain way of caring for ones body.18 It was not so much a removal of sexual desire as it was a way to integrate it into daily practices while still maintaining a specific economy of health and life promotion. The Regimen was set up to seek a diet appropriate to mans nature, which conditions a measurement between exercise, food and drink intake, and sex. Excess was accepted, but not integrated since it presented a problem of practicing protection against illness and danger to the body and the soul:
16 17

Recall Bataille (1985) and Girards (1979) notions of sacrifice. The Use of Pleasure (1990) 18 Ibid, p.97

Smith 8 For if the aim of regimen was to prevent excesses, one might exaggerate the importance one lent to it and the autonomy one permitted it to assume. This risk was generally perceived as having two forms. There was the danger of what might be called athletic excess; this was due to repeated workouts that overdeveloped the body and ended by making the soul sluggish[] But there was also the danger of what could be called valetudinary excess; that is, the constant vigilance that one applied to ones body, ones health, to the least ailment.19 These two excesses show that dietetics were not meant to extend life as far as possible, but rather to make it useful and happy within the limits that had been set for it.20 The Regimen of dietetics was established for the Greeks to survey and observe their constant need for (spiritual) happiness, an askesis or art to adjust behavior from falling into a lack of care for the self. These excesses, also, were not meant to be observed as leading to illness or death, but rather that sexual activity or not following the Regimen would lead to a danger in general [of] mans mastery, strength, and life.21 When it comes to sexual activity, there is a violence of the sperm to womans pleasures, an expenditure of sperm that was valuable for mans existence, and that too much expending of sperm would lead to either death or immortality: marked by excessive sexual behaviors, the individual was fated to die, but became immortal when expending outward. This part of the dietetics, Foucault notes, was not so much a political regulation as it was an erotic and ethical one of extending and strengthening existence: Elaboration and exercise in this case concerned the act itself, its unfolding, the play of forces that sustained it, and of course the pleasure with which it was associated; the nullification or indefinite postponement of its completion enabled one both to carry it to its highest degree in the realm of pleasure and to turn it to ones greatest advantage in life. In this erotic art, which sought [] to intensify [] the positive effects of a controlled, deliberate, multifarious, and prolonged sexual activity, time [] was exorcised.22 Differing from the Hebrews emphasis on purity of the self to God, this act of purity was to spiritual enlightenment of the self in regards to the Regimen-as-law. Exercising purity in the Hebraic sense was to be Holy, while for the Greeks it was to become an individual finding their sense of pleasure.
19 20

Ibid, p.104 Ibid, p.105 21 Ibid, p.125 22 Ibid, p.137

Smith 9 Cloaca Maxima: The Leading of Civilization It has been said23 that the Cloaca Maxima was one of the first sewage systems in the world. Developed in Rome, it was connected by eleven aqueducts that supplied water into the city and channeled outward to the River Tiber. The Maxima was the last resort of the leading of the water from the Baths of Diocletian and Trajan, fountains, and waste to the outfalls into the Tiber. This sewage system started as an open-air canal, which lead through the city. However, the King of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, ordered the canal be covered, when the city itself became much more valuable. Seeing as how shit flowing through the city would leave an awful stench, it was believed that civilization and citizens in Rome would go from normal, everyday humans, to a regression to something less than human. Not the Greeks, since the king himself inherited a genealogy of the Tarquins from Greece, but rather to those outside of Rome. As we can see, this sewage system was a prime development in the proper to uphold legal and economic foundations that sought to keep Rome itself away from barbarians that Tarquinius had fought against, such as the Latins and the Sabines. However, their lands were later incorporated into the Roman Empires extension. The issue I want to address with the relationship between the sewage system and the Empire was that the Maxima didnt stop at Rome: it became a territorial architecture, along with the aqueducts, to detail the specific developments of an identity. The construction of sewage systems didnt necessarily end there, as well. What is interesting to note is that the Cloaca Maxima was watched over by the goddess of sewage, Cloacina. Coming from the Etruscans mythologies after being incorporated by Rome, her role was an aspect of Venus, the goddess of sex. This extension of Venus to Cloacina in relationship to waste and sewage shows that the sewage system of the Cloaca Maxima was meant to overlook not only the wealth of the Roman Empire, but the safety of sexualitys continuation. Those outside of the Empire needed to be cleansed of the filth and mire that Rome and its sewage system needed to mask through protection. This incorporates, to a larger and greater extent, the Greek Regimen of dietetics, although this time, it is an architectural design that exhibited collective identity, rather than individual
23

Cf. Laporte, History of Shit. See also Platners A Topological Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929).

Smith 10 development. This infrastructural undertaking continues today, although more carefully through sewers, garbage collection, and sanitation processes that seek to improve and distinguish, much like the Hebrews, what is separate from the Human. Baptist Empire: Sins of the Past It seems that with each new topological-typological shift within the discourse of sanitation, there is a huge appropriation made on the part of the next formation. From the Greeks and the Jews, the Romans took collective and individual identity, all the while formulating an Empire based on cleanliness, capture, and violence. However, when Christ had died for our sins, this Empire took on a non-violent appearance in the form of cleanliness, to be holy again from the violence that took up in the Roman Empire. This is what we took from Christ: the baptism. To bathe in the waters is to be adopted into the Heavens above. It is the washing away of sins. The baptism ritual sought for a sinner to be unified again with God for all the atrocities and sins that weve committed. Purification found itself aligned with water, a religionized sewage area from the Romans. It is a saving to enter the kingdom of Christ. The practice of baptism did not occur only in forgiving the sins of fighting and committing violence, but the development and identification of heresy was important to save. Sanitation, again, takes on another form: the baptism of philosophy. In 1198, Pope Innocent III, policed heretical tendencies that apparently appeared to have invaded the medieval centers of learning. He distinguished scholasticism from heresy, whereas [t]exts considered pernicious were removed from the curriculum; the teachers of Paris were forbidden to introduce their students to Aristotles new philosophy, his metaphysics, or Avicennas commentary, and in the process the school became one enormous mechanism designed to produce reasoning that was straight and true.24 These baptisms of texts allowed for a disciplinary action to recognize what was heretical and what was considered correct positions that can be saved: Scholasticism cast out all ornamentation and gradually slid into a dessicated formalism; but at least in Paris and other university cities, including Oxford and Toulouse, a certain body of theological doctrine appeared. Deliberately designed as a reaction against heresy, it very soon became a more rigorous affair.25

24 25

Cf. Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals (1981), p.145-146, emphasis mine. Ibid, p.145-146

Smith 11 What was right from wrong, clean from dirty, good from evil, and scholastic from heretical, was merely a Roman economic affair appropriated by the followers of Christ in areas that were once part of the Roman imperial territory. This architecture defined a very rigid and restrictive set of ethical disciplines that identified with non-violence, all the while being overtly violent in attacking differing points of view which made up the substance of that baptism in the first place. God is dead: Enlightenment and its Discontinuities Kant said it best when defining the Enlightenments motto as Dare to know!26 To question, to categorize, and to always find the conclusion: these were imperatives to human philosophy, and have since then, held the foundations of knowledge production tightly down. Enlightenment had various discontinuities that continued its project. For one, it was anthropology. However, it could not be practiced as a discipline without enabling some form of economic power exchange going outward, then inward. Through capitalism, we see this economic power exchange working well enough through an apparatus of capture. Going outward to expand land and property, colonialism and imperialism, practices appropriated from the Romans, although in our history books were not labeled as violent, were violent through codification, genocide, and capturing land into the Same. All things Other in the expanded and expanding world were subject to the daring to know of Enlightenment. The emphasis on a now secular world after the death of God actually enabled the discontinuities of the past to continue. It should be noted that secular, as a word, is bound to the Scripture. Regardless if this was a practice that wanted to separate itself from the religious, it was committing a violence that was already religious and being Holy by making people follow the word of God. This process of Enlightenment still continues today. It achieves itself through discontinuities of knowledge sharing and knowledge production. For Foucault, knowledge is not separated from secular and religious: Divination is not a rival form of knowledge; it is part of the main body of knowledge itself.27

26 27

Kant, What is Enlightenment (1784) Foucault, The Order of Things, p.32

Smith 12 This echoes Kierkegaards sentiments that [w]hat looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.28 The clean and the dirty, that modern practice of sanitation, is a biopolitical formulation that has religious ties to understanding life and its maintenance. Because of capitals outreach from the Eurocenter to the outside, we see the clean and the dirty being implemented violently in the everyday today: slums being demolished for urban metropolises, gentrification, urban segregation, and the cast(e)ing off of visibility. Daring to know became daring to show the correct ways to reality, except that reality then and now is masked without making aware the religious history behind these things, and the labor that was utilized to uphold those foundations. This is where Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud find their critiques of Enlightenment and modernity. However, we must go further than Enlightenment. Fascism and Total Sanitation It could be argued that the one political and economic practice in history that wanted to be totally sanitized was fascism. Totalitarianism is ultimate restriction, xenophobic, and genocidal. We see this in action with the Nazis identifying as Aryans, the master race, acting in removing those that were holding back the purity and success of being totally pure: Jews, homosexuals, disabled persons, etc. If fascism is the most extreme form of property, I can only say that there is an element to upholding sanitation to the most extreme, and for health and hygiene only in part for the national identity. Its not in favor of all races or differences, but the one identity that seeks to rid or incorporate elements that are considered dirt. We see that in the most contained and containing economic principles, like fascism, and more in line today with globalized neo-liberalism, that those who profess to be in-line with these positions, such as Hitler, Mussolini, Milton Friedman, or Ron Paul, there is this seeking to become clean to property, to follow suit to debt, or to accept death through violence. Nevertheless, both of these extreme practices are violences that enslave both its propagators and participants who wish to continue the project of purity and total sanitation. Conclusion: Batailles General Economies
28

Featured in Bataille (1985) The Sacred Conspiracy

Smith 13 We must begin to understand that through each topological density mapped out in this hygienealogy notices a type of subjectivity that is not made apparent, but a violent subjectivity that arche-people become. This fanged violence appears when someone is told that shit is disgusting, is made disgusting, and makes the subject that is Holy, Separate, and mapped out into categories. This, I feel, is centered on the sanitation of sanitation: the death of subjectivity. Subjectivity has a long history, as you can see from above, that is set up in a contract with Power. Seeing as how symbolically God may be dead in modern times, He still is at work in the discontinuities that have been systematically put up in place and made the world very congested with restrictions. If knowledge is, itself, Divination, we need to begin to think of what non-knowledge consists of. It can be said, historically, that both capitalism of the West and socialism in the USSR are examples of restrictive economies, since both worked with property in some respect. If we are to open the realm up to a general economy, we need to be rid of the sense of property or the sense of belonging to the human. This does not mean only to remove anthropocentrism, but anthropomorphisms as well. The general economy, to Bataille, is the expenditure of waste into energy, but waste does not compose only that which is pushed aside. Waste consists of excess energy that goes beyond our sight of waste, but to the cosmic region as well: A surplus must be dissipated through deficit operations: The final dissipation cannot fail to carry out the movement that animates terrestrial energy.29 As a common theme to Batailles work, the Sun is the highest form of Capital: all energy for Life, in the Human sense, is derived as products from the Sun. However, it is because the Sun continues to produce excess energy that we cannot consume all of its products, and we are left to our own devices to systematically employ what, where, and how this excess can be used. Thus, we have systems of restriction, not generalization. The particular economies in history deal with property in a way that deals either with the individual or the collective, a sense of ownership to self or shared ownership. However, a general economy deals not with property at all. To Bataille, [c]hanging form the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually

29

Bataille, The Accursed Share vol.1, p.22

Smith 14 accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking and of ethics.30 If we are truly to complete a Copernican revolution, it would only be that of the Human that has to change the mindset. However, we are not asking for a change of mindset, but a complete expenditure of everything, including the conceptualization of the Human. Each different topological density mapped in the hygienealogy also deals with its own sense of proper. Returning to the Latin proprium, which means own, self, individual, and translated to the Romantic languages as clean,31 proper here is divided and distributed to make almost every citizen, after the sovereign, as their own personal sovereign, transcribing their own forms of cleanliness or dirtiness. Although, these citizens dont realize that the discursive functions behind the ideas and how theyve materialized over time, disciplinarily mechanized and incorporated into the Same. To expend without return: this is the goal of the general economy. This way, it overturns sovereignty, discontinuity, apparatic participation, subjectivity, and most importantly, the rule of God and the Scripture. The general economy is an ethics to pushing the way towards an economy of no logos, what Bataille would call a system of non-knowledge distinguished by atheology. Atheology, to Bataille, is the elimination of anguish. He writes that The anguish is the beings anxiety over its future, the temporality of the spatial being is itself anguish. If the being were not leaning over the abyss of anguish and of suffering, if its presence in space and time were not threatened, if the approach of death did not have to be incessantly compensated for by a growth of the spatial field of possibilities comparable to shortening the distance in time.32 This means, that although anguish may not appear to be something of spatio-temporal instances, it is when anguish is categorized by the Human, and it is, ultimately, Erotic.33 To relate it to dark waste from above,34 if Being is a hoarder for its univocity, the general economy, atheology, and the elimination of the Erotic from all things (the absolute death of God) is the transcription of becoming-imperceptible, the impossible death of all things discursive. We must consider that a general economy will fulfill the utmost of a sort of

30 31

Ibid, p.25 See also Serres (2007), Kristeva (1982), and Laporte, mentioned above. 32 Bataille, Aphorisms for the System, in The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, p.168 (2001) 33 Bataille deals with this in Erotism (1986) and the second volume of The Accursed Share (1993). 34 See previous essay.

Smith 15 transvaluation of all values from a hygienealogical standpoint: the sanitation of the sanitation of History. It will completely decimate the violent incursions and incorporations that distinguish the proper from the improper. It is not asking for a change of perspective, or enlightenment: hygienealogy, atheology, and the general economy seek to end discursive practices that incorporate, integrate, and violate arche-knowledges into becoming a part of the Same. The cleansing of cleansing becomes integral to this foundational masking of the base, the most abject (God) to repeat itself not as the first, but the repetition of them all.35 We may have killed God, but His materialization still works as a baroque particle to what is clean and dirty. But who knows which came first: the dirty or the clean?

35

See Deleuze, The Fold (1992). The first fly, he writes, does not start them all, but repeats them all, becoming a discontinuous fold as an object.