From Clinamen to Conatus: Deleuze, Lucretius, Spinoza

Abstract

In 1961, Gilles Deleuze published a short essay titled “Lucrèce et le naturalisme” in the journal Études philosophiques.¹ At the end of the sixties, a version of the essay, approximately two pages longer, which included the entirety of the earlier version (with the exception of a diagram) appeared as one of five appendices to The Logic of Sense.² It was presented under the heading “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy” where it was preceded and, in a certain sense, introduced by an essay on Plato, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” also a revised version of an earlier essay originally published under the title “Renverser le platonisme” (“To Reverse Platonism”) in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in 1967.³