Intoxication: (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)

From Plato's Symposium to Hegel's truth as a "Bacchanalian revel," from the Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication constitutes an excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy's sober ambitions for appropriate forms of philosophical behavior and conceptual lucidity. At the same time, intoxication displaces a number of established dualities—reason and passion, mind and body, rationality and desire, rigor and excess, clarity and confusion, logic and eros. Taking its point of departure from Baudelaire's categorical imperative to understand modernity—"be drunk always"—Nancy's little book is composed in fragments, quotations, drunken asides, and inebriated repetitions. His contemporary "banquet" addresses a range of related themes, including the role of alcohol and intoxication in rituals, myths, divine sacrifice, and religious symbolism, all those toasts to the sacred "spirits" involving libations and different forms of speech and enunciation—to the gods, to modernity, to the Absolute. Affecting both mind and body, Nancy's subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius—I am, I exist—drunk.

About the Author :
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century's foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.

Review :
"Intoxication, a short reflection from Jean-Luc Nancy, explores the ambivalent pleasures of intoxication as it has been configured within histories of philosophical and poetic thought. This abundant meander through the work of Plato, Hegel and Baudelaire among others offers readers a rewarding, even intoxicating, experience." -Bjarke Morkore Stigel Hansen, LSE Review of Books "Read Nancy's wonderfully exhilarating Intoxication and you'll understand why it is urgent to be, like Rimbaud's boat, ivre. Make no mistake: French ivresse has little to do with intoxication's dull thud of medical measure. Leave intoxication for breathalyzers; ivresse is pure elation, sublimated elevation, an ecstatic Bacchic frenzy soaring to poetic rapture, a rapture that, as Hegel stated, achieves the dizzy dissolution of all absolutes." -- -Jean-Michel Rabate University of Pennsylvania "The originality of Intoxication lies in the acuity and patience (and indeed the touch of humor) with which it teases out the surprising concurrence, or interaction, of two apparently unrelated terms-that of the "Absolute" on the one hand, and that of "ivresse" or "drunkenness" on the other." -- -Richard A. Rand University of Alabama