Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues3

3 | 2003
Figures de l'irrationnel

Figures of the irrational

 

The irrational is not so much defined as it is declined according to its relation with its other: reason (which is hardly more absolute). Here we will propose a few cases of the irrational, a few of its figures, which lead to questioning its overly frank borders. How can we make sense of Parmenides’ and Empedocles’ persistent grounding of physics in mystery religions or shamanism? In Euripides’ Bacchae, doesn’t the hero’s delirious experience of the divine reflect the limits of a human reason which can never have the last word? On another level, when classical alchemy calls itself Hermetic it cannot be confounded with what 19th century esotericism makes of it. Moreover, we must acknowledge the embodied figures of the irrational: not only the madman, but also the woman, the child, the primitive. The concept of “degeneracy” will combine, in 19th century psychiatry and criminology, all of these alleged forms of abnormality—thereby preparing, little by little, its future reversal: the overtaking of ordinary reason in the figure of the artist. It is precisely to this destiny that surrealism devotes the primitive—up to the contradiction which resides in reconstructing a lost authenticity and spontaneity. And to this list we must add the mystical, which, within the three different approaches of Lévy-Bruhl, Bergson, and Bataille, emerges as the field of experience wherein reason plays with its other.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search