The late-nineteenth century dandy is, by his own avowal, a cliché blending different influences, amongst which Baudelaire might be seen as a determinant character in building up the aesthete’s identity. As a means of healing or of self-destruction, drugs appear not only as another accessory in the dandy's panoply, but as a path to reach the hidden side of the self. Through painting as much as through writing, artists such as Jean Lorrain and Jeanne Jacquemin struggle to define the dreams and nightmares they fear and yearn for and, above all, yearn to draw the picture of what they fail to know in themselves. Moreover, through the Idealist and Symbolist movements, this addictive artistic struggle to define the unknown tries to give shape, through a renewed language, to shapeless and immaterial thoughts and fantasies, thus announcing the experimental creativity of Surrealism.

Can Don Juan be seen as a sex addict ? In the twentieth century, authors and critics have tried to understand the inconstancy of the hero and multiply hypotheses to explain his inability to experience true love. The advances of the psychoanalysis and the psychopathology renew the perception of the myth and enrich the psychology of the character as these analyses have inspired the writers who integrate them within their works of fiction. Repressed impotence, latent homosexuality, badly overcome OEdipus complex… Such are a few of many attractive hypotheses to explain the famous « catalogue » of seduced women. Behind this reflection on addiction, the question of Don Juan’s ageing also arises. By allowing the access to the psychology of the hero, novelists also consider Don Juan from the angle of perversion and give us an opportunity to understand a pathological conscience.

This article attempts to re-historicize the metaphor of religion / opium in A Season in Hell. This contextualization will initially be achieved in view of the heuristic metaphor as seen in works by Kant, Novalis, Heine, and more importantly by Marx, whose statement “Religion is the opium of the people” is widely recognized. By pre-establishing clear guidelines for meaning, the heuristic metaphor will be used to overcome grammatical and semantic aporias in Rimbaud’s extended metaphor. This contextualization will also be done with regards to the paradigm shift occurring in the 19th century concerning the social representation of opium. This transformation will set a foundation for a poetic of addiction, drawing toward both religious need and rejection. The final segment will attempt to show how Rimbaud incorporates, within the framework of his poetic of addiction, a way out of religion.

We will begin with the premise that drug intake, and furthermost the representations that surround this intake, are a reflection of a given time and culture’s atmosphere. That is to say that the way in which drugs are understood in general can be a strong indicator of a certain era’s imaginary. This imaginary can, amongst other techniques, be probed through a study of literature. We are proposing to do this through a reading of 19th century occidental authors and by striving to create a synergy between literature, the intake of consciousness-altering substances and Romantic aesthetics. The ways in which drugs are treated in literature can be a useful means of grasping the atmosphere and aesthetics that each era conveys.

Associated with compulsive books collecting, bibliomania is considered a “gentle madness” border-lining addiction and obsession. While the term “bibliomaniac” was coined in the 18th century by a physician at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, the figure of the book collector goes back to the 16th century when it was hold to be more of a caricature than a character. However, the core of this “cultural disorder” is the desire to collect certain books, manuscripts or magazines in order to satisfy the indefinite compulsion. The article analyses bibliomania as an imprecise addiction to the book as object and to the passion for its esthetic possession, portraying in the same time some of the most exciting characters of the history of book collecting. As for the bibliomaniac, he stands probably for the symbol of unconditional and unrequited book love.

The theme of madness is not really new in West African litterature. In such litterature, some crazy people have even become famous, such as Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s character in l’Aventure Ambiguë. This old topic is present in Ahmadou Kourouma’s and Ken Bugul’s writing under a new label : actually, their respective novels, Les soleils des indépendances, and La Folie et la Mort, are not only marked by an aesthetic that portrays characters suffering from kinds of madness but also by a writing style that standardizes the non-observance of standards. The discourse on madness therefore rimes with the social discourse and helps portray the situation of an African people undergoing mental degeneration.

Anthropology of addiction to pepper in negro-culture In bulu context, eating well means eat foods of animal origin, which generally puts a lot of condiments, particularly pepper considered as the key ingredient in the preparation of this type of food. In this socioculture where members are accustomed to eat mostly vegetables, the ozan expresses this natural desire that everyone can have for these preferential foods which are meat and fish resources. However, it is important to distinguish having the ozan, a desire that everyone can have, and be ozan that subsumes the individual finds it difficult to do without this type of food, and traduce in this cultural context, a pathological state which can causes a systematic rejection of dishes where pepper does not enter into the composition. This article aims to show how the unstoppable desire of pepper called ozan may appear both as a normal eating behavior and as an anomic one.

New series of remarks by the Paris Spleen translator in Polish.