Laurent de Sutter is a Belgian philosopher.

In your 2017 book, Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Theory Redux), in 2017 , you examined the anesthetization of contemporary life. Two years later, in What Is Pop Philosophy?, you revisited the concept introduced by François Châtelet and Gilles Deleuze—who once remarked, “I felt that alcohol helped me make concepts.” In your latest work, The Art of Intoxication (PUF), you further explore this idea. How does Deleuze’s notion of philosophy shape your understanding of intoxication as a conceptual tool?

Laurent de Sutter: Deleuze is always present in my thinking especially because something very important to him is equally vital to me: the idea that thought in general, and philosophy in particular, only matter insofar as they reveal what is not yet. Philosophy is not here to confirm what exists, legitimize what is, or provide justifications.

Rather, as Deleuze said, philosophy is a kind of science fiction—a form of fabulation about what probably isn’t there and may never be. Philosophy is more like a literary genre of fiction than a scientific lens on the world.

In the case of alcohol, it is obviously a perfect space to imagine another possible fabulation of the world—one that no longer takes the form of a rational, moderate, or sober commentary on what is, but rather something born of intoxication, staggering, even the stammering linked to alcohol.

From this perspective, alcohol—or more precisely, intoxication—produces a conceptual effect: the refusal of sobriety, the challenge to sobriety as the primary criterion of what constitutes good thought, a good idea, a good concept, or a sound theory.

It seeks to produce an experience—an experiment, a hypothesis—asking: what if everything brought into thought doesn’t stem from sobriety but rather from a form of intoxication?

Could intoxication, in art, society, politics, or even metaphysics and ontology, reveal more about what is than the sober claims that have long been accepted as the pure core of truth?

Nietzsche famously denounced alcohol and Christianity as Europe’s “two great narcotics,” seeing them as escapist delusions. Yet in your book, alcohol appears not as a refuge, but as a revelatory force—almost apocalyptic in its implications. Are you consciously opposing to Nietzsche here ?

Laurent de Sutter: Yes, that’s true. Nietzsche is, in a way, the hidden adversary of this book. The doctrine of intoxication—if one can call it that—that I try to develop through five figures: the Arab poet Abû Nûwâs, the Chinese calligrapher Zhang Xu, the Japanese philosopher Nakae Chômin, the writer Dorothy Parker, and, of course, Rabelais.

What I’m building through these five figures is something that is entirely unlike the kind of super-sobriety Nietzsche called for—a sobriety that, metaphorically, is like someone on a sinking ship desperately convincing themselves they are on solid ground.

There’s a complex relationship Nietzsche had with intoxication: on one hand, he promoted it; on the other, he firmly forbade alcohol.

For me, alcohol is fascinating precisely because it offers a thought experiment that challenges 2,500 years of philosophy—a history that has always sought to reduce, to subtract. That’s what sobriety essentially........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)