Livre VII

L'ivresse

Volume VII of (SIC) is an ode to drunkenness, in the broadest sense of the word. It formalizes thoughts on the quasi natural connections between various forms of intoxication and art. Isn't inebriation an essentially aesthetic state of mind? Whether it overwhelms us by means of absorption or secretion, routinely or exceptionally, amid noise or in silence, it is a burst of illumination, stirring up the mind, exalting the spirit, invigorating and carrying us away. It promises rapturous ecstasy – that oceanic feeling, that hyper-consciousness and hyper-presence of the world. Drunkenness is a matter of purging the sublime by removing the dross of reality, sucking out all the marrow of life, imbuing the whole outside world with an intensity of interest and seeking the soul on a higher plane of consciousness. At once a transfiguring force and a means of detachment from reality, drunkenness is a poetics of the beauty of the situation and ephemeral experience. Drunkenness can be cruel, too, intensified by the unbearable intuition of its imminent fading: its hours are numbered, concentrated in an instant – the instant of paradoxically infinite enjoyment. What’s worse is pharmacological intoxication, a remedy that denies its own poison. Once it becomes pathological, it consumes us, wastes our lives away and forgets. This is the drunkenness sung here, even though it seems a futile enterprise. Ever faithful to its essential immediacy, it wears off with reflection, submitting to the mediation of consciousness. Drunkenness defies the telling.

Editor: Sébastien Biset

Essays by Sébastien Biset, Antoine Boute, Emmanuel Giraud, Pierre Hemptinne, Tom Marioni and Véronique Nahoum-Grappe

Published in 2015
In French
16 x 23.5 cm
152 pages
ISBN: 978-2-930667-13-3
EAN: 9782930667133

__(SIC)

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