Abstract

In the last chapter I suggested that part of the appeal of the return to Lucretius today could be the sublime persuasiveness of the idea that there’s an “underground current” of his influence flowing beneath the surface of the history of philosophy. Even non-Althusserians have converged on versions of the same subterranean image. Deleuze, for example, refers to a second, “volcanic” line of argument in the scholia of Spinoza’s Ethics, which persists “underneath” the one articulated in the propositions and expresses the theme of demystification in the name of joy that Deleuze also associates with Lucretius (1988: 28–29). Likewise, Serres describes the persistence of ancient models in the history of science being like a vast “tectonic plate” and a current of magma with very great viscosity (2000: 162). A good place to start my discussion of the four representative twenty-first-century readers of Lucretius, the titular “new Lucretians” who adopt and adapt elements of the interpretations I have discussed in the last two chapters, is therefore with the theme of marvellous natural wonders. Morfino makes it the subject of his most extensive discussion of Lucretius in the essay “Lucretius and Monsters,” originally published in 2013.