#...i own it like a tiger owns his territory and i defend it similarly...

[uncanny-tranny]

The absolute biggest thing I've learned as a trans guy: there is nothing more masculine and manly than not caring about looking or acting masculine or manly. Growing your masculinity or manhood takes time and care - you have no obligation to let the world water your garden when you can do that just fine (and you can, even if it doesn't feel like you can!)

[mason-mem]

first pages of Michel Serres’ Malfeasance

I URINE, MANURE, BLOOD, SPERM

THE LIVED FOUNDATIONS OF

PROPERTY RIGHT

TIGERS PISS ON THE EDGE OF THEIR LAIR. And so do lions and dogs. Like those carnivorous mammals, many animals, our cousins, mark their territory with their harsh, stinking urine or with their howling, while others such as finches and nightingales use sweet songs.

To mark: the origin of this verb is the mark of a footstep left on the soil. In bygone days, the story goes, the whores of Alexandria used to carve their initials in reverse order on the soles of their sandals. This enabled prospective clients to read the imprints on the sand and discover both the desired person and the direction of her bed. The presidents of great brands promoted by advertisers on city billboards today would no doubt enjoy knowing that like good sons they are direct descendants of those whores.

Or perhaps they descend from creatures that mark the boundaries of their territory with their excrements. Similarly, certain plants throw out little invisible jets of acid . . . nothing grows in the frigid shadow of fir trees.

THE CLEAN AND THE DIRTY: ANIMAL CUSTOMS, HUMAN CUSTOMS

How do the living inhabit a place? How do they establish it, recognise it? Lions through smell, birds by hearing . . . advertisers and whores by sight. Here we have three senses on the alert. How do animals create links as powerful as the law is for humans, links that enable them to appropriate the habitat where they dwell and live?

The science of animal behaviour, ethology, describes at length those nests, holes, wallows, sheds, ecological niches .... in short, how males define and defend their habitats with their filth. These places are often secret, hidden, dark, buried, lost, places where the living eat, sleep, hibernate, copulate, give birth, and are born, in short survive; do they own or rent these places? How can we answer this question, which is perhaps a bit too anthropomorphic? We can easily turn it around.

In The Parasite, I described the customs of mammals in order to compare them to hominine ways of appropriation. Whoever spits in the soup keeps it; no one will touch the salad or the cheese polluted in this way. To make something its own, the body knows how to leave some personal stain: sweat on a garment, saliva or feet put into a dish, waste in space, aroma, perfume, or excrement, all of them rather hard things . . . but also my name, printed in black on this book cover, where my signature looks sweet and innocent, seemingly unrelated to those habits. And yet. . . . Hence the theorem of what might be called natural right. By "natural" I mean the general behavior of living species: appropriation takes place through dirt. More precisely, what is properly one's own is dirt.

The spit soils the soup, the logo the object, the signature the page: property, propriety, or cleanliness. The same word tells of the same struggle; in French, it has the same origin and the same meaning.1 Property is marked, just as the step leaves its imprint. Conversely, I should re-mark—yes!—that a hotel makes the rooms clean and proper to make them available for others. Otherwise, no one would come. Conversely, clean and proper here implies there is no well-defined owner yet, and that it is freely accessible. In short, either proper means appropriated and consequently dirty or proper implies really neat and therefore without an owner. Come over here, to this clean spot; you may, because it obviously welcomes you. When you leave, it will be yours because you will have made it dirty. No one will want to sleep in your sheets, nor handle your used towel, nor drink from your glass seeded with bacteria from the imprint of your lips. You appreciate the cleaning done in a hotel. The cleaner it looks, the more hospitable it will seem to everyone. At home, I take care of the garbage and occupy a space called by the delightful name of powder room. Long ago, we hardly dared to translate the famous quote stercus suum cuique bene olet,1 "one's own excrement smells good." This is still true of noise; one's own noise is not bothersome. This is also true of many types of trash. It is again true of small children who have similar behaviours at the anal stage.

THE EXPROPRIATED SQUAT Discreetly, dictionaries define squatter, as the term indicates, as someone who occupies the surface of the land on which he crouches. This would take up little space; only a dwarf could lie down on such a spot. No, squatting describes the crouching posture of defecation and that of females when they piss or give birth.

The origin of the old French verb es-quatir, originally used in the Far West and Australia, is first related to the verb co-acticare, the old curious root of cogito, through co-agere or co-agitarey" indeed, my thoughts move around in me like a large assembly of sheep in the meadows. Now, farmers in these two New Worlds led even larger herds on lands that they considered to be without owners, even as their grazing and their presence expropriated Indians or Aborigines who had been living there before them, albeit without title deed, at least according to common law. So there was nothing about this term that would imply crouching. As soon as it acquires that meaning, it can be linked to the earlier one: to invade and possess. The fact remains that animals never leave places free of droppings as they trot along.

FROM THE HOME TO THE FARM

I will now go from the soup, polluted by spit, to the dirty sheets, or from the table to the bed, to get from individual appropriation to family property, from the city rat to the field rat. Indeed, the arable square of land, the stretch of vineyard or alfalfa, the pagus of the ancient Latins, properly belonged to the peasant tribe because the bodies of ancestors were buried there, in tombs or under stone slabs. Did you know that the word paix, peace, comes from pieu, the stake that marked the boundary of the tilled pagus? The mortuary slab was also used as a boundary around which peaceful relations with neighbours could be established. I'll end my remarks with a discussion of this peace.

I will also explain how the aforementioned peasant or pagan—same terms similarly derived from pagus— appropriated this patch of land in the same quasi-animal fashion. Is there anything more disgusting than what has no name in any language: the stench emanating from a mass grave? Except perhaps the stench of manure spread out at the appropriate season to improve, enrich, and fertilise the soil. Perhaps you doubt that the main reason to cover the field with this biodegradable layer of fatty fertiliser, this urine nitrogen, is for the sake of appropriation. However, I would still like to convince you that I find here a possible origin of agriculture. When the first human enclosed a plot of land and thought of telling his children, his parents, and his wife to imitate him and his animals by depositing some of their urine and faeces in order to make it a piece of earth belonging to the family, he noticed with surprise, come spring and summer, that the polluted field was greener and more productive than the neighbouring soil. Could he possibly have founded the farming profession and rural society with this act?

As you travel, do admire that peaceful—same word as pagus—landscape, beautifully divided, of the old countries of Europe; their rural spaces display fertilising manure and the Cities of the Dead.

l. Professor Serres plays on the various meanings of the French propre, which means both "clean" and "one's own," or "characteristic of." The French title Le Mai propre is itself a pun on several levels: mal is evil, combined with propre; it thus signifies "clean evil," but malpropre in one word also means dishonest, sleazy, despicable. I have chosen to emphasize the combination of evil and dishonest by translating the title as "Malfeasance," which has similar connotations. [All notes are from translator.]

2. Latin proverb, provenance uncertain, quoted by Michel de Montaigne, in Essais, III, VIII.

3. Co-agitare: from the Latin co- (together) and agitare (to move around, revolve).

inspired by @aazzure 2019.19.14