Caught in the Swerve: The Epicurean Legacy of Post-War French Philosophy | Dr. Raghu Menon Jayakumar

This talk was given by Dr. Raghu Menon Jayakumar (Postdoctoral Fellow, Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education) on 28 September 2024.
Abstract: The talk explores the influence of Epicurean metaphysics and ethics in twentieth-century French philosophy, particularly in the works of Deleuze, Derrida and Onfray. In response to the seemingly deterministic tendencies of Democritean atomism, Epicurus and his followers argue in favour of an unpredictable and indeterminate swerve in the motion of the atoms. This aberrant movement introduces a degree of contingency and uncertainty in the fabric of reality, which, according to Lucretius, is also the basis for our free will. We will use this idea as a point of departure to explore the relationship between contingency, metaphysics and ethics in the surviving fragments of Epicurus and the subsequent explication and defence of his position given in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things; mid to late first century CE). Though Epicureanism left a lasting impact on many post-Renaissance philosophers in Europe (Gassendi, Diderot, Marx), we will restrict our attention solely to its presence in post-War French philosophy. The Lucretian interpretation of Epicureanism informs some of the key arguments offered by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1968) and Logic of Sense (1969) and by Derrida in his essay ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean stereophonies’ (1988). For the former, the constitutive contingency of Epicurean metaphysics serves as an antecedent to his own differential metaphysics, whereas for the latter, Epicureanism, through the notion of the swerve or the clinamen, anticipates the concept of a mark or a trace that informs some of his important works. We will conclude the talk by briefly considering its impact on the hedonistic ethics and politics of Michel Onfray (2015).