Title
The Efficacy of the Slight: Zhuangzi and Lucretius in Times of Ecological Crisis
Abstract
This talk explored 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 the speaker, Prof. Jane Bennett, has termed 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 away from climate disaster.
Prof. Bennett demonstrated how the entire world of perceptible things in the Zhuangzi is but a hair’s breadth from the (generative) Absence (wu 無); likewise, she showed how an indiscernibly slight swerve of atoms (and those fortuitous collisions that ensue) in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura 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. Therefore, she argued that 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. She then considered some ecological practices and modes of action that might follow this orientation toward living.
CEAS was a co-sponsor of this talk together with the Department of French & Italian, Anonymous Fund, and the Center for European Studies, among others.
Biography
Jane Bennett is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, nature-writing, American romanticism, political rhetoric and persuasion, and contemporary social thought.