archive : s0metim3s

°…

June 27, 2008

Just wondering - has anyone read Sean Alexander Gurd’s Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology? A rather glowing review at Symploke, and of some interest to me in reading Lucretius, considerations of the mos maiorum and the like … not to mention the current cylon preoccupation and all. An excerpt from the review

°Schmitt, at a tangent

June 7, 2006

What follows are fragments, with some modification, pulled from notes for a longer study on Lucretius, which explains the Latin turns and preoccupations – they barely amount to a reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan”, from which my attention kept veering. Xposted to the Long Sunday symposium, which continues for the rest of the week, and likely to have more sustained engagements with Schmitt than offered here.

Carl Schmitt is not, I think, the 20th century’s most persistent philosopher of the political but of the mos maiorum – which is to say, politics conceived as the inheritance, codification and preservation of a ‘way of life’. In Schmitt’s writings, as in Lucretius’s time, the mos maiorum ascends to conceptual reverence in the midst of and as a symptom of its crisis.

Filed under: Necropolitics + Schmitt + Lucretius
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°Materialist writing

June 2, 2006

While not published until 1996, Lucy Hutchinson’s (1620-1681) translation of De Rerum Natura in the late 1640s or 1650s was, it seems, the first English translation of the work.

Filed under: Sense + Lucretius
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°Trajectories 2

June 1, 2006

In response to offblog queries - ok, I was being a little obscure in the most recent post on Lucretius, the series of which are here. So, let me put a blunter point on it.

Filed under: Borders + Machiavelli + Lucretius
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°Trajectories

May 28, 2006

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.

Filed under: Sense + Escape + Necropolitics + materialism-aleatory + Lucretius
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°Impietas, virtù

May 19, 2006

Some wandering notes. In Machiavelli and Us, but also elsewhere, Althusser combines Lucretius’s understandings of the clinamen, chance, repulsion and combination with that of Machiavelli’s argument that the Prince must ’seize fortuna by the hair at the right moment’, thereby realising (as Illuminati will put it) “all of its virtù-potenza“.

And yet, reading back through Lucretius, it is possible to find a fairly persistent critique of precisely this masculined, war-like - or perhaps, better: warlordist - characterisation of virtù. I will have to chase down Pamela Gordon’s “Some Unseen Monster: Rereading Lucretius on Sex” in The Roman Gaze, which seems to discuss this at some length. But for the moment, some remarks on – and meanderings around - De Rerum Natura.