Clinamen (pronounced /klaɪˈneɪmɛn/, plural clinamina,
derived from clīnāre, to incline) is the Latin name Lucretius gave
to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in order to defend the atomistic doctrine
of Epicurus.
According to Lucretius, the unpredictable swerve occurs
"at no fixed place or time":
When atoms move straight down through the void by their own
weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain
places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if
they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down
through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would
occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature
would never have produced anything.[1]
This indeterminacy, according to Lucretius, provides the
"free will which living things throughout the world have."[2]
Modern usage
The OED continues to define clinamen as an inclination or a
bias.
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce alludes to the term on the
very first words of his work: riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of
shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth, Castle and Environs. If "Eve and Adam's" refers to
"even atoms" in the Epicurean sense, the word swerve has a
special meaning.
In Difference and Repetition, Gilles
Deleuze employs the term in his description of multiplicities,
pointing to the observation at the heart of the theory of clinamen that
"it is indeed essential that atoms be related to other atoms."[3] Though
atoms affected by clinamen engage each other in a relationship of reciprocal
supposition, Deleuze rejects this version of multiplicity, both because the
atoms are too independent, and because the multiplicity is
"spatio-temporal" rather than internal.
Simone de Beauvoir,[4] Jacques
Lacan,[5] Harold
Bloom,[6] Jacques
Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain
Badiou[7] as
well as Michel Serres[8] have
made extensive use of the idea of the clinamen, albeit with very different readings.
References
^ Lucretius,
ii. 216-224. Translation from Brad Inwood, L. P. Gerson, (1994), The
Epicurus Reader, page 66. Hackett
^ Lucretius,
ii. 251
^ Gilles
Deleuze, Paul Patton, (1994), Difference and repetition, page 184
^ in
"The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1948), trans. Bernard Frechtman;
Publisher: Citadel Press, ISBN
0-8065-0160-X
^ in
"The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis" (1973), Publisher:
W.W. Norton & Co. (April 17, 1998), ISBN
0-393-31775-7
^ in
"The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of
Poetry" (1973), Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 2 edition (April
10, 1997) ISBN
0-19-511221-0
^ in
"Theory of the Subject" (1982), trans. Bruno Bosteels; (New York:
Continuum, 2009): ISBN
978-0-8264-9673-7 (hardcover)
^ Hanjo
Berressem in Abbas, N. (2005), Mapping
Michel Serres, page 53 University of Michigan Press
