The Efficacy of the Slight: Zhuangzi and Lucretius in Times of Ecological Crisis

Room L150.

media release: Jane Bennett’s talk explores a trans-temporal resemblance between the Zhuangzi (a source-text for Daoism, China, 5th-3rd century, BCE) and the materialism of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (Rome, 1st century, BCE).  The two orientations affirm what she calls the efficacy of the slight — the salience of the most spare of shifts in the flavor of the real. The operative presumption is that the tiniest difference can be what matters the most, and this thought could be salient for us as we struggle today to identify and forge paths aways from climate disaster. In the Zhuangzi, the entire world of perceptible things is but a hair’s breadth from the (generative) Absence (wu 無); likewise, in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, an indiscernibly slight swerve of atoms (and those fortuitous collisions that ensue) gives birth to every formed item (natura naturata). Both texts bespeak of a liminality between “not-there” and “there,” an oh-so-subtle interval or gateway between world and not-world. This pivot is called the “hinge of the Dao” in Zhuangzi and named as the barely-there, already-gone swerve (clinamen)in De Rerum Natura. Both texts mark the power of that which is utterly sparse and share a desire to live in creative sync with that extremely slight edge. Just what this might entail is not easy to say, but at the end of my talk I will consider some ecological practices and modes of action that might fit the bill.”

Organizer: Jan Miernowski

Sponsors: Department of French & Italian, Anonymous Fund and the Center for European Studies

Supporting Units: Institute for Research in the Humanities; Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; the Center for the Humanities; the Center for East Asian Studies; the Department of English; the Department of Philosophy; the Department of Political Science; the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies; the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+