CartCreativity and Intoxication Instructors: Adam Jones & Andrea CetruloProgram: Transdisciplinary StudiesCredit(s): 1Date: June 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd.Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: Beer served as a nourishing staple in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, while wine in Greece and Rome symbolized vitality and truth, encapsulated in the phrase In vino veritas (In wine, truth). In Christianity, wine continues to embody a sacred symbol of unity and renewal, as seen in the Communion ritual. Virginia Woolf eloquently described the wine as evoking a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”
This Seminar will present texts from the realms of theology, philosophy, poetics, and literature to contextualize intoxication and its place within the practices of knowledge production and its expression in writing. By drawing on sources both at the edges of the modern European tradition and beyond it, from Bataille to Hafez and Lispector, we will explore the inner experience of the intoxicant as an underacknowledged method of creativity.
Session 1: Alcoholism and Theology: This Session will present the technique of inebriation as it concerns the relation to the divine, the epistemology of drunkenness, and its deployment in James’ account of mysticism, Jones’ theological-phenomenological investigation of alcoholism, and Bataille’s methodology of Non-Knowledge in his project of Atheology.
Session 2: Libation and Literature: This Session will investigate the integration of intoxication into literature, with specific attention to the use of wine imagery in Islamic poetry and the writings of Clarice Lispector and Alejandra Pizarnik regarding the narrative structure of experience.
Session 3: Drunkenness and Delirium: In this Session, intoxication will be linked to the extremities of the mental, in terms of mania and rupture, drawing from Mohaghegh’s study of mania as well as the rupture in the experience of madness as described in the psychedelia of Laing’s anti-psychiatry.
Session 4: The final Session will review the submitted works by participants in an open discussion, as a conclusion to the Seminar. A short assigned film will also guide the discussion.
IMAGE: Saramanete and Deborah Robbiano, Untitled, 2024
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