Women, Wine, and Truth

Through the old Latin formula in vino veritas, I propose a deconstructive link between women, wine, and truth. Even though the phrase doesn’t involve an explicit reference to the feminine, I explore texts by Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, in which women are implicitly associated with themes of inebriation. My aim is to construct a “drunken syllogism” or an onerologism, as I have named it, that operates as follows: women are like wine > truth is a woman > in vino veritas. I state that a series of destructive effects follows from this onerologism for philosophy, which allows me to sustain a stronger thesis about the exclusion of the feminine from the realm of philosophy: the fear of its own ruin.