Intoxication

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.

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.

Summary

Philosophy holds an ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication, this excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy’s sober ambitions for conceptual clarity and appropriate behavior. Displacing established dualities—mind and body, reason and desire, logic and eros—Nancy’s subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius—I am, I exist—drunk.

Product details

• Authors: Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc/ Armstrong Nancy
• Assisted by: Philip Armstrong (Translation)
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2015
• EAN: 9780823267729
• ISBN: 978-0-8232-6772-9
• No. of pages: 72
• Series: Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory; Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory; Idiom: Inventing Writing Theor
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies