By Jacques Lezra, Liza Blake
Lucretius's shadow is lengthy and extends around the Humanities. Bringing jointly essays via students on the best in their box, this ebook examines the connection among Lucretius and modernity. Nuanced and passionate, those essays supply an account of what's at stake once we declare Lucretius for modernity.
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Additional info for Lucretius and Modernity: Epicurean Encounters Across Time and Disciplines
Sample text
Lucretius—and this is important—is no exception. 26 There is some question as to whether he fully grasped what was at stake, because real uncertainty about basic facts is the best explanation as to why he does not accept that the length of the sun’s seasonal movement between the tropics along the ecliptic is the reason why the length of daylight hours varies with the seasons, and this entails a further belief in the permanence of the sun.
Serres’s claims about nonlinear time are thus a valuable provocation for reception studies, insofar as they demand that we think more explicitly about the models of temporality that we assume when we move between the past and the present. If, at times, it is necessary or desirable or strategic to affirm that texts are sticky objects that come to us with the accretions of every generation between us and antiquity, a claim that takes the notion of linear history very seriously, at other times, it is preferable to confront the sudden, live emergence of an ancient text at a space and time far removed from its point of origin.
58 The choice that Serres describes here ends up driving a wedge between the two figures he was at pains to join together on the common ground of the nature of f luids at the beginning of the book. The path of military strategy, which stands under the sign of Ares, is taken by Archimedes with his warmachines and complicity with state-sponsored violence. Lucretius takes the other route, following Epicurus in a self-conscious turn away from a martial physics toward the law of Venus. 60 The very ambiguity within the provocative claim “Lucrèce a raison” thus enacts the double-sidedness of Lucretius’s contemporaneity in Serres’s reading.