Intoxication

Use in the book

The account of drunkenness distinguishes retaining a moral maxim from correctly applying it to a person. Political intoxication is then judged worse than intoxication by wine. The companion claim that wine can heighten conscience contrasts being drunk on wine with being drunk on mind, the latter linked with impiety. A further wine comparison defines fanaticism as dark, harmful and furious intoxication, whether religious or irreligious. These are Joubert’s speculative and polemical assessments. They are useful for his distinctions between moral notions and their application, not for modern advice about alcohol or mental health.

Places to read

1. II, p. 496–497, entry 14, ¶1Wine and political intoxication affect moral judgment differently in Joubert’s account.
2. II, p. 497, entry 4, ¶1Wine is contrasted with being drunk on mind.
3. II, p. 879, entry 10, ¶1Fanaticism is compared with dark and furious intoxication.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains the conditional capacity to reason and the conscience/memory relation. Esprit in drunk on mind does not mean distilled spirits. The religious-wine analogy preserves its historical generalizations as Joubert’s claims rather than independently verified facts.

Use in the book

Fusées I calls intoxication a number, joining it to the individual's multiplication. Fusées II makes great cities religiously intoxicating. In Fusées III, by contrast, intoxication, delirium and opium are comparisons used to measure the more dreadful bodily spectacle of love. The passage does not simply celebrate altered consciousness; it uses its most violent effects as a scale of disintegration.

Fusées XVIII locates intoxication in the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing. The intoxicant is a social reversal: what others reject becomes evidence of the speaker's distinction. The ending of Fusées XXII makes the reversal more intricate still. The supposedly cool dandy is intoxicated with his own composure. Ivresse can attach to mastery as well as to loss of mastery, making self-command another possible object of self-enchantment.

Mon cœur mis à nu XXX revisits the writer's intoxication in 1848 and asks of what kind it was. Vengeance, demolition and literary recollection replace an uncomplicated story of political conviction. Mon cœur mis à nu LXIX's list of intoxications includes blood and crowds, so the vocabulary also maps shared ferocity. The late injunction to suppress excitants in Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII is a practical resolution, not proof that the earlier experiences were unreal. It proposes a different management of the energies that those fragments alternately seek and mistrust.

Places to read

1. Fusées IIIvresse religieuse des grandes villes. — Urban expansion is given a sacred and altered intensity.
2. Fusées XVIIICe qu’il y a d’enivrant dans le mauvais goût — Displeasing others becomes a source of heightened pleasure.
3. Fusées XXIIenivré de son sang-froid et de son dandysme — Even cool self-possession is susceptible to intoxication.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIvresse littéraire ; souvenir des lectures. — Political excitement is retrospectively traced to literary memory.

Translation in this edition

The edition consistently preserves ‘intoxication’ in the main metaphorical clusters, including ‘literary intoxication’ and ‘religious intoxication’. ‘Drunkenness’ would be too specific for many of them. The final ‘intoxicated with his composure’ retains the deliberate contradiction between excitement and sang-froid. The translation therefore leaves readers to judge the object of the intoxication instead of marking the state uniformly as either inspiration or impairment.