Intoxication (Idiom Inventing Writing Theory FUP) by Jean-Luc Nancy

Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory

by Jean-Luc Nancy

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 Ego sum, ego existo ebrius--I am, I exist--drunk.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published December 1, 2015

About the author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).

Reviews

[Cinematic Cteve · Rating 5 out of 5]

At last. A philosophy I can get behind.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nancy with a glass of wine? Rambling? Yes. Great? Yup!

[Derek Frasure · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first experience with Nancy and I will definitely read more from him. This was surprisingly dense despite the wealth of quoted material, large font, and short length. To read more of what I got from it, you can read this thread: https://twitter.com/TheVice_Admiral/s...

[Leonardo Sa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acachapante.

[Cristina Chițu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intoxication bears the legacy of sacrifice—communication through fluids and its outpourings, with the sacrum, exception, excess, outside, interdiction, the divine. In short, intoxication is the success of a sacrifice whose victim would be the sacrificer himself.