Gerard Passannante

Shortlist of Phi Beta Kappa.

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Three-week residency, Summer 2019

After exploring a variety of literary and philosophical cases—for example, ancient arguments about cosmic order, Hamlet’s “bad dreams,” and the discovery of calculus—this project seeks to understand how our own contemporary patterns of thinking about scale bear the imprint of largely forgotten theological and philosophical controversy.

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American Comparative Literature Association co-winner for best first book in Comparative Literature, 2013 for The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition

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Abstract

I use the term “formalism” to name the tendency of compulsion to reduce experience, through repetition, to a simple shape, rhythm, and intensity. This essay shows how compulsion’s reduction of the self to just a few characteristics enables—even solicits—analogy across different contexts. Focusing on Othello, I consider several aspects of Shakespeare’s staging of compulsion: the two-way traffic between religious and secular domains; the splitting of the self, which often entails the projection of the self onto others; and the role of such splitting in the representation of racialized violence.

This essay locates in Max Weber’s body of work a theory of recognition in compulsion. With particular attention to Weber’s engagement with pre- and early modern sources, the essay argues that this theory illuminates his project of historical interpretation. For Weber, compulsion turns firsthand experience into a simple pattern or shape, inviting identification across differences in context. Ultimately, the essay shows that the “strange intoxication” of compulsive states of mind, though it might seem to transport the subject outside time and beyond the reach of material circumstance, does much more than misleadingly fuse distinct experiences; it also creates opportunities for and indeed motivates awareness of the concrete histories that connect them.

We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

Scholars have read this text as an expression of a "religious crisis," and they have described the event of its destruction as a critical turn both in Ficino's thought and in Renaissance intellectual history. This essay explores an alternative explanation for Ficino's early engagement with the poetry of the ancient atomist, revisiting a number of familiar problems in the scholarship, including the philosopher's ideas about the uses of poetry, the story of his intellectual development, and the influence of Lucretius in the Quattrocento. As Ficino sought to revive Plato in Latin, I argue, he may have been drawn to the author of De rerum natura as a model of philosophical and poetic transmission.

This essay explores the encounter with materialist thought as an experience of catastrophe. Against the explicit aims of materialist philosophers like Epicurus to encourage peace of mind, early modern authors discovered in materialism a style of thought that felt at once enticing and alarming, even disastrous. “Catastrophic materialism” helps us understand how a much-maligned philosophy captured the imagination, as well as the critical function it served.

International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23 (2016): 1-3.

Looking at a variety of cases--from Montaigne’s descriptions of bad reading in the Essais to Shakespeare’s portrayals of characters who make much of little--I show how and why, in early modern culture, the habit of making “anything of anything” calls questions of ontology to mind.

Brooke Holmes and W.H. Shearin, eds. Dynamic Reading, Oxford, 2012.

With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost—a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe.

By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Passannante argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters—a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering.

From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be “reborn”?

Read more at the publisher's website.

(2010): 1247-1248.

(2009): 1015-1047.

61.3 (2008): 792-832.