Laudator Temporis Acti

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, tr. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; rpt. 2001), p. 150:

I regret this for all sensitive readers, but the fart, even if not emitted, cannot be omitted. Those who do not want to talk about it would also have to have kept silent about the arse. The subject matter demands it, and after we have spoken about oral matters, our presentation, for better or for worse, must go through its anal phase before we come to the genitals. To speak of the fart is not difficult insofar as it represents a sound that always means something in social situations. Witnesses of a fart inevitably interpret the sound. All in all, the semantics of the fart is a rather complicated problem, a problem that is seriously neglected by linguistics and communication research. The scale of meaning stretches from awkwardness to contempt, from humorous intentions to lack of respect. Teachers, professors, speakers, and conference participants all know the torture of having to stifle a fart because such a sound expresses something that, in reality, one does not want to say. Could it aid our empathy with politicians if, in listening to their speeches, we were to think more often that they are possibly at that very moment concentrating on subduing a fart that has been wanting to interrupt their talk? The art of the vague statement is related to the art of unobtrusive flatulence: Both are diplomacy.

Semiotically, we assign the fart to the group of signals, that is, of signs, which neither symbolize nor depict something but rather point to a situation.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: noctes scatologicae