ABSTRACT
Incontinence humiliates because it reminds the helplessness of one's beginning and, indeed, of end. Laughter, which registers the difference between how things are and how they ought to be, can be provoked by the kind of category error that wetting one's pants as an adult seems to instantiate. Being 'taken short' prompts a primordial sense of shame the initial dampness and the subsequent pong become signals, shouted to the world at large, that one has failed to contain those bodily fluids that carry so much significance when they break out of the private realm, to which they belong, into public spaces and into the awareness of that collective of strangers called 'the public'. It may seem perverse to seek philosophical illumination in such unpromising material as urine that ends up in the wrong place. Incontinental philosophy suggests that willy-leaks and the institutions constructed around them may be even more revealing than Wiki-Leaks.
