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    Intoxication
    Intoxication
    Intoxication
    Ebook47 pages46 minutes

    Intoxication

    By Jean-Luc Nancy

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFordham University Press
    Release dateDec 1, 2015
    ISBN9780823267743
    Intoxication
    Author

    Jean-Luc Nancy

    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.

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      Book preview

      Intoxication - Jean-Luc Nancy

      NANCY_Intoxication.jpg

      INTOXICATION

      INTOXICATION

      JEAN-LUC NANCY

      Translated by PHILIP ARMSTRONG

      Fordham University Press    New York 2016

      Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      This book was originally published in French as Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse © Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2013. The quotation from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., © Peter Matson.

      Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

      Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

      Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2015935157

      Printed in the United States of America

      18  17  16    5  4  3  2  1

      First edition

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      The text that follows was originally read at a vineyard in Alsace in April 2008, in the town of Ribeauvillé, part of a discussion organized around the theme of intoxication.

      I would like to thank Mark Bender, Jennifer Branlat, May Mergenthaler, Bert Harrill, and David Petrain, especially for help tracking down sources and quotations. I would also like to thank Tom Lay and Eric Newman for their care and help in bringing the text to publication.

      In response to a number of questions, Jean-Luc Nancy offered unusually generous feedback and advice. While his suggestion to add inebriated asides to the translation was tempting, the translation seeks to remain faithful both to the spirit in which it was written and to its original layout in the edition published by Éditions Payot & Rivages. All footnotes are my own.

      INTOXICATION

      You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without respite.

          But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue—take your pick. But be drunk.¹

      (Thus speaks Baudelaire—perhaps we know this only too well—because, in the end, why this commandment as an exergue to modernity? Why do we need this imperative regarding intoxication if

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