°Materialist writing
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. 
°Trajectories 2
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.
°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.
Filed under: Sense + Escape + Necropolitics + materialism-aleatory + Lucretius
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°Impietas, virtù
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.
Filed under: Machiavelli + materialism-aleatory + Lucretius
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°Oh cheeky cheeky
You can remix some of the multitracks from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, here or listen to Eno play dj on kcrw.
Some more here and, of course, here and EnoWeb ~ some past effusions here.
And the video of “Mea Culpa” under the fold. Which seems like a good soundtrack to re-reading Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura - prompted, in part, by wondering about the revival of metaphysics (eg, Alliez’s The Signature of the World or, for a more considered engagement, Steve Shaviro on Whitehead). Or, if you prefer, you can just watch Ambient Music for Airports.
°Marx’s birthday
xposted and with some and with some prefatory remarks conveniently out of the way, and since it is the occasion of Marx’s birthday, a pastiche on origins, emergence, dates and anniversaries:
°Lucretius, fugai
“Since you must admit that there is nothing outside the universe, it can have no limit and is accordingly without end or measure. […] the boundary cannot stand firm anywhere, and final escape from this conclusion is precluded by the limitless possibility of running away from it.” - Lucretius (c.99-55 bc), De Rerum Natura - Book I (trans. RF Latham, Penguin, 1952, pp. 55-6). A different translation here, in part: “does compel that thou concede the all spreads everywhere, owning no confines”. And further along: “the chance for further flight prolongs forever the flight itself.”
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