On Excrement and Death

From Harry Frankfurter's On Bullshit:

Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.  Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted.  In this respect, excrement is a representation of death that we ourselves produce and that, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining out lives.  Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive (pp. 43-44)

and also, it stinks.