The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations

2. Turning Toward the World: Lucretius, in Theory

t w o Turning Toward the World: Lucretius, in Theory ‘‘Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian’’: Michel Foucault’s extravagant gesture in the opening paragraph of his 1970 essay ‘‘Theatrum Philosophicum’’ (ostensibly a review of two books by Deleuze , Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense), is perhaps the bestremembered utterance in that piece.1 In the pages below, I will be following the prompt of this outrageous declaration to ponder what Foucault might mean by ‘‘Deleuzian’’; since it is not a quality only to be attached to Deleuze, I presume, it raises the question of the kind of philosophical theater into which Foucault would usher us and the genealogy that it implies. To answer these questions in brief: by ‘‘Deleuzian,’’ Foucault seems to mean ‘‘decentered,’’ a style of philosophical analysis that proposes problematics rather than solutions, ongoing inquiry rather than a dialectic based in question and answer. ‘‘There is no center, but always decenterings,’’ Foucault announces on the opening page of the essay (165); the answer to a question, he says later, is the problem, and the response to the problem is to displace the question (185). Hence, the Deleuzian philosophical ‘‘world’’ is an intellectual cosmos that is not singular but 31 32 Turning Toward the World multiple. This cosmos without a center takes its cue from Epicurean philosophy. ‘‘It is time to read Diogenes Laertius,’’ Foucault announces (169), gesturing thereby to a host of ancient philosophers and above all to Epicurus, the concluding figure in the Lives of Eminent Philosophers (the chapter also includes the bulk of his extant writing). The emphasis there is on a thinker whose decentered world is not vectored along the axes of up and down, the Epicurus who avers in the ‘‘Letter to Pythocles’’ the existence of infinite worlds.2 To indicate what ‘‘Deleuzian’’ means, Foucault points back to the Epicureans in order to point the way forward. A genealogy lies in this gesture: ‘‘The arrow of the simulacrum released by the Epicureans is headed in our direction’’ (172). Foucault’s essay does not really say much more than this, but I wish to follow these double gestures here: back to Epicurus, forward to the time when ‘‘Deleuzian’’ might name twentieth-century philosophical thought. In moving back to the Epicureans, I look mainly toward Lucretius, since De rerum natura offers the most articulated version of those ideas that remains for us. Foucault points us to this text thanks to the prompt supplied by Deleuze. The Logic of Sense concludes with an appendix entitled ‘‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy.’’ Its first section is on Plato, the second on Lucretius. More generally, in the pages that follow, my aim is to move from this Deleuzian encounter to take stock of the role that Lucretius plays in what will come to be called ‘‘theory.’’ Opening this question is a way to contemplate aspects of theory beyond the closure that designation now seems to recall. In pursuing what Foucault names his ‘‘Deleuzian’’ agenda, it is worth noting that his essay-review takes off from the margins of The Logic of Sense. His inquiry is motivated by the question Deleuze asks in the opening sentence of his appendix: ‘‘What does it mean ‘to reverse Platonism’?’’3 This is Nietzsche’s question , as Deleuze acknowledges; in his essay, Foucault takes it to be Deleuze ’s as well. Affirming with Deleuze that this question indicates the ‘‘task of the philosophy of the future’’ (253), Foucault’s mode of engaging it involves multiplying its central term, ‘‘reverse.’’ If one is to perform this operation, Foucault suggests, sounding the first of several turns on ‘‘reverse,’’ one must overturn the true-false distinction, turning Plato thereby, and philosophy with and after him, in the direction of decentering and problematizing (166). Overturning in this way is not identical to Lucretius, in Theory 33 reversing, for reversal maintains the true-false distinction even if it changes its vectors. Rather, it is vectoring itself that needs to be changed. In a paragraph in which Foucault rings the changes on ‘‘reverse,’’ he writes that Plato needs to be converted, which for him means that Plato needs to be turned toward the world (168). So, Foucault concludes, taking his line of thought not quite to a place articulated by Deleuze, to reverse Plato is to pervert him. Even as this reading unfolds Deleuzian implications, it unfolds the injunction to...