Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism

398 Pages·2012·2.832 MB·English

by  Brooke Holmes, W. H. Shearin (eds.)

CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece
and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the
past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the map-
ping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and
identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest schol-
arship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use,
and abuse, of the classical past.
Dynamic Reading
Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism
EDITED BY
BROOKE HOLMES AND W. H. SHEARIN
1
1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dynamic reading : studies in the reception of Epicureanism /
edited by Brooke Holmes and W.H. Shearin.
p. cm. — (Classical presences)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-979495-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Epicureans (Greek philosophy) I. Holmes, Brooke II. Shearin, W. H.
B512.D96 2012
187—dc23 2011031838
ISBN: 9780199794959
Printing number: 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
Note on Editions xiii

Introduction: Swerves, Events, and Unexpected Effects 3
W. H. Shearin and Brooke Holmes
1. Haunting Nepos: A tticus and the Performance of Roman
Epicurean Death 30
W. H. Shearin
2. Epicurus’s M istresses : Pleasure, Authority, and Gender
in the Reception of the K uriai Doxai in the
Second Sophistic 52
Richard Fletcher
3. Reading for Pleasure: Disaster and Digression in the
First Renaissance Commentary on Lucretius 89
Gerard Passannante
4. Discourse E x Nihilo : Epicurus and Lucretius in
Sixteenth-Century England 113
Adam Rzepka
5. Engendering Modernity: Epicurean Women from
Lucretius to Rousseau 133
Natania Meeker
6. Oscillate and Refl ect: La Mettrie, Materialist Physiology,
and the Revival of the Epicurean Canonic 162
James A. Steintrager
7. Sensual Idealism: The Spirit of Epicurus and the
Politics of Finitude in Kant and Hölderlin 199
Anthony Curtis Adler
8. The Sublime, Today? 239
Glenn W. Most
vi Contents
9. From Heresy to Nature: Leo Strauss’s History of Modern
Epicureanism 267
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
10. Epicurean Presences in Foucault’s T he Hermeneutics
of the Subject 303
Alain Gigandet
11. Deleuze, Lucretius, and the Simulacrum of Naturalism 316
Brooke Holmes
Bibliography 343
Index 367
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Éditions Kimé for permission to print a modifi ed
translation of Alain Gigandet’s essay “Présences d’Épicure,” fi rst pub-
lished in Frédéric Gros and Carlos Lévy (eds.), F oucault et la philosophie
antique (Paris, 2003), and Vita & Pensiero for permission to print a
revised version of Glenn Most’s “The Sublime, Today?,” fi rst published
in an Italian translation by Margherita Redaelli as “Il sublime oggi?”
in Elisabetta Matelli (ed.), I l Sublime: fortuna di un testo e di un’idea
(Milan, 2007).
We would also like to acknowledge the generous support of The Barr
Ferree Fund, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
and the Max Orovitz Research Award in the Humanities, University of
Miami.
We are very grateful to the anonymous readers for the Press for their
helpful comments. Special thanks are due to Jim Porter and Stefan
Vranka, who unerringly guided the project from its beginning some years
ago to its end. Deirdre Brady and Sarah Pirovitz both went beyond
the call of duty in helping us secure permissions for the images and
otherwise shepherding the manuscript to completion. Finally, we have
been fortunate to have a wonderful production team. We would like
to thank Natalie Johnson, our production editor at OUP, Kiran Kumar,
our production manager, and especially our excellent copy editor,
Katherine Ulrich.
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Contributors
Anthony Curtis Adler is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, where he has
been teaching since 2006. His translation of Fichte’s C losed Commercial
State , together with an interpretive essay, will be published by SUNY
Press in Spring 2012, and he has also authored journal articles on a wide
variety of topics in literary theory, German literature, and philosophy.
He is presently working on a study of Friedrich Hölderlin’s theory of
the political.
Richard Fletcher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Classics at The Ohio State University. His book, A puleius’ Platonism: the
Impersonation of Philosophy , is forthcoming from Cambridge University
Press.
Alain Gigandet studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure
de la rue d’Ulm and took his Ph.D. in the History of Ancient Philosophy
at the Sorbonne (Paris I). Currently, he teaches Ancient Philosophy
at the University of Paris-East, Créteil (formerly Paris XII). His research
focuses upon ancient Epicureanism, as well as its modern and contem-
porary reinterpretations. Published work includes F ama deum. Lucrèce
et les raisons du mythe (Vrin, 1998), L ucrèce, Atomes, mouvement (PUF,
2001), and (with P.-M. Morel) L ire Épicure et les épicuriens (PUF, 2007) as
well as numerous papers upon various aspects of ancient Epicurean
philosophy and modern readings of Epicureanism (Montaigne, Diderot,
Leopardi, Hegel, Strauss, Foucault).
Brooke Holmes is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton
University, where she currently holds the Elias Boudinot Preceptorship.
She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the
Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 2010) and the co-editor, with
W. V. Harris, of A elius Aristides between Greece, Rome, and the Gods (Brill,
2008), as well as articles on Homer, Euripides, the history of medicine