Out-of-body writings: Italo Calvino’s residual literature

Abstract

The essay "La poubelle agréée" by Italo Calvino, published in The Road to San Giovanni, features an unusual theme when we consider the writer’s work in question: writing as garbage. Discussing the act of taking out the garbage, Calvino established some considerations on the relationship between consumption and disposal, appropriation and expropriation, so that the destination of consumed goods would be a multiplication of the expelled residues. Therefore, this paper aims at reflecting on writings as one of the residues that are excreted by the body, considering that what remains from writings are also garbage, a waste deposed from the author’s body. To reiterate this relationship between writing and excretion, we rely upon Corpus by Jean Luc Nancy, for whom the writing throws itself away from the author’s body, inscribing itself in the reader’s body. We thus understand man as a scum producer, and consequently the arts as scum as well. Based mainly on Agamben, Benjamin and Didi-Huberman, we discuss the possibility of the eschatological literature – desecrated, de-auralized – establishing itself as a kind of counter-apparatus before the controlling society through profanity.