To feel the emotion of ilinx is to experience a kind of temporary turbulence that provokes a disorientation reaching down to the very core of our sense of self in the world.
Is it a French word? Not really.
French sociologist Roger Caillois borrowed the term from the ancient Greeks, who used it as a label for whirlpools and other similarly whirling things. In a framework still used by game theorists today, Caillois asserted that ilinx is one of just a few core categories of sensations created by playing. He described ilinx as “a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind… which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness”.
Ilinx can be sought for its own sake, as a kind of fun loss of control within limited parameters, as when children spin around until they fall over, giggling at their own loss of equilibrium. The subjective experience can also be pursued as a doorway to more enduring transcendence, as with the whirling dervishes, more formally known as the Mevlevi Order of Sufis, who engage in a prolonged twirling dance as a means of achieving contact with what they perceive as a sacred reality.
At both scales, ilinx can be interpreted as one form of the disorientation peculiar to liminality, a frame of mind that is created within ritual experiences. Ilinx is also discussed at great length in the rather un-ilinx German journal Ilinx, in which long pages of black letters obediently line up, not spinning even one little bit.
The emotion of Ilinx is illustrated quite well by the boat ride orchestrated by Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka underneath his chocolate factory.
