Intoxication

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.

"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