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Why Lucretius and why now? This would be a fair question given the flurry of books produced over the past few years exploring the 1st-century BCE Roman poet/philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus. To mention but a few of these: Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, 2011, Lee Fratantuono's A Reading of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, 2015, Lucretius and Modernity (Lezra and Blake, eds 2016), Ryan Johnson's Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter, 2017, and now Thomas Nail's ambitious Lucretius 1 - An Ontology of Motion, 2018, the first part of a trilogy exploring the philosopher's work in relation to contemporary thought. Perhaps the astonishing thing is that such an ancient text remains controversial, speaking afresh to each generation - each interpreter, even - which is one of the more consistent themes that underpins these recent commentaries. Greenblatt's book, the most populist listed above, explores this constant re-reading through the rediscovery in 1417 of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) by the Florentine Poggio Bracciolini, who immediately had it copied (rather than destroyed as a heretical text due to its 'irreligious' content).
In Greenblatt's narrative, this rediscovered fragment of ancient philosophy is a catalyst for 'the modern, a triumph of humanist science over religious dogma. It is possible to trace many other 'rhizomatic paths' from this point of initial rediscovery through to the Enlightenment and right up to post-Deluezian philosophy. With Lucretius positioned as a kind of protomaterialist philosopher, we also have various 'underground currents of materialism' mapped out, for example by the early Karl Marx, Louis Althusser and, more recently, Antonio Negri, each citing Lucretius as a critical point of origin. Here, Lucretius is presented as opposing the dominant state-controlled warmongering empire, with its religious and military ideological traps and debts, a philosopher who suggests we look to nature and attempts to...