°Trajectories
Two short extracts from chapter one:
[…] De Rerum Natura begins with - for what will shortly announce itself as a materialist polemic against religion - a somewhat surprising dedication to alma Venus. And yet, it is a particularly sonorous, voluptuous devotion that will, according to Lucretius, show the vestigial traces of the universe and dispel fears of gods and of death – but only on condition that the reader is prepared to listen, to be moved by the poem’s transformations of the Roman deities and attentive to a veritas that is constitutively kinetic.
This inaugural appeal to the figure of Venus is, for Lucretius, both an index of the “poverty” of the Roman language which demands recourse to the pantheon – albeit in this case, as simulacrum – and, given the fertility of Venus, the chance for an escape. And so, Lucretius will proceed to craft word and syntax, reference and pun, to arrange and rearrange the sounds shaped by tongue and lips, so that he might perturb the Roman sensorium just as the swerves of atoms recompose the universe. […]
Yet, the Lucretian clinamen is not the expression of the libera voluntas so frequently read into De Rerum Natura. Rather, it is the movement of a singular will and passion, considering that, for Lucretius, the locus and experience of the mind (or intellect) and heart are indistinguishable - hence: sua cuique voluntas. Horrified by the scene of Iphigenia’s propitiatory sacrifice to a war fought over the propriations of another woman’s body (that of Helen), the figure of alma Venus begins the metamorphosis into Natura who will, as it turns out, sharply rebuke man for his ceaseless labours – which is to say, according to Lucretius, his fear of death. But it is against this singular passion, this particular trajectory of the Lucretian spear and the materialist polemic, that certain trends of materialist philosophy will turn, and as a consequence, will restage the sacrifice and pay tribute to a Sisyphian productivism in seeking to fix the boundary-line. […]
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Where is the excerpt from? Would love to know more.
Gp [November 15, 2008 @ 1:57 am]