Abstract

Analysing the notebooks and the references to Lucretius in Marx's works, Morfino concludes that it is possible to excavate a major discontinuity in Marx's interpretation. The Lucretius of the juvenile notebooks on Epicureanism, who functions as a model of abstract self-consciousness, is overtaken, in the scattered references from the period of Die deutsche Ideologie and Das Kapital, by a Lucretius for whom nature becomes a continuous process of transformation of its parts - a process in which the human species is itself immersed.