archive : s0metim3s

°Sensus

July 30, 2008

~~Some~~ A fragment from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, for skin.

Sometimes I come across a track that says it all - or what seems like all for me in that moment, reminds me of something very particular, about music, memory, remixing, repetition and riffing, of the indistinction between mind and body, of the proprioceptic and the temporal.

Filed under: materialism-aleatory + mixtapes
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°One day in London …

March 9, 2008

What does one do on International Women’s Day?

Filed under: materialism-aleatory + London
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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.