Intoxication (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory) - Softcover

Nancy, Jean-Luc

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823267733 ISBN 13: 9780823267736

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2015

Synopsis

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 this title

About the Author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought is developed in many books, including Expectation: Philosophy, Literature; The Possibility of a World; The Banality of Heidegger; The Disavowed Community; and, with Adèle Van Reeth, Coming (all Fordham).

Philip Armstrong is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.

Review

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 Rabaté 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)

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0823267733
• ISBN 13: 9780823267736
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72