Excremental being

There are some things  that I have found in Bataille..   The notion of excremental being is very strong in his work.  Consider society as a human organism.   Some people will form the parts of it that function, like eyes and ears and others will be intestines or excrement.  Bataille thought that "heterogeneous" beings were those who did not fit the regulated, homogeneous structure of society and were excreted out.  You might be able to find his essay, "On the psychology of Fascism".   He speaks about it here.  Basically these excremental beings are strong, but separated from everything else.  So fascism gets moving when they are reintegrated into the whole.

There is also another aspect to this in that if we consider, again, the whole of society as a kind of bodily structure, people tend to project unrecognized and unwanted parts of themselves into others.   For instance, if they are dependent, they might project dependency.  As Melanie Klein points out, they are literally trying to get rid of their excretions.  I say, "literal", because there is a literal aspect to all this.  The person projected upon feels dirty and estranged.   Klein says that the infant does this form of projection on and against its mother.  "Here, take my excretion.  YOU are disgusting!"

So there are invisible transactions like this going on all the time, and they are far from being merely symbolic or imaginary.  Rather, they do have a direct material effect on those who get treated in this manner, especially if the treatment is prolonged.  

When I began my research into this, I started to understand that what shamanism ought to address is how to handle these projections as material realities.  Start taking them seriously.  Realize that they are actual, although invisible, forces that can do some severe damage to your life.

If we have weak boundaries, due to some kind of psychological trauma, we are more likely to be affected by these forces, as we are less able to recognize and deflect them.  That is like being a person without skin.   It would be worse if you are actually taught to embrace your weakness rather than work against it.  Actually I was taught this, because that was the female gender role I was supposed to adjust to, but that means taking on everybody's projections and allowing them to be the infants who want to transfer onto me the identification with their own excrement.  

I think it is sometimes enough to recognize that humans do wish to excrete themselves to gain a sensation of purity and that they will use anyone around them who has experienced psychological damage as their toilet.  It's a general dynamic that is not particularly personal. 

And there is a certain truth, also, to the fact that war cleans everything up and makes this dynamic either more obvious or more difficult to impose because people do get thicker skins when they recognize they are at war.   The thicker skins themselves repel these forces.   But weak or compulsively liberal societies seem to make them endemic.   Everybody suffers from them and this is considered the norm.

So learning to be at war with oneself and with others, as Nietzsche recommended, can be a healthy solution.

Our understanding of what is real and what isn't seems to take care of itself when we can differentiate these negative forces projected by others from our real selves.   That's easier said than done, especially if you are basically a kind and gentle person who takes on the burdens of others.  But it has to be done.