clinamen

Marx was also familiar with Lucretius's theory of clinamen.

The OED defines clinamen as an inclination or a bias.

London: Clinamen Press.

They are: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades.

For Epicurus, the chance "swerve" (or clinamen) of the atoms simply defeated determinism to leave room for autonomous agency.

Epicurus for the most part follows Democritean atomism but differs in proclaiming the clinamen (swerve or declination).

Philosophy's Literature, Clinamen Press, Manchester, 2001.

One famous proponent of this view was Lucretius, who asserted that the free will arises out of the random, chaotic movements of atoms, called "clinamen".

His theory differs from the earlier atomism of Democritus because he admits that atoms do not always follow straight lines but their direction of motion may occasionally exhibit a 'swerve' (clinamen).

Writing one generation after Aristotle, Epicurus argued that as atoms moved through the void, there were occasions when they would "swerve" (clinamen) from their otherwise determined paths, thus initiating new causal chains.

In English it implies that one is inclined or biased towards introducing a plausible but unprovable clinamen when a specific mechanism can not be found to refute a credible argument against one's hypothesis or theory.

No, what's troubling is its language, a style in which words difficult in themselves - clinamen, kenosis - are assigned wholly private meanings, in which Blakean aphorism and allegory too often substitute for analysis and example.

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.

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."

Marx was influenced by Antique materialism, especially Epicurus (to whom Marx dedicated his thesis, "Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus", 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty.

Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou as well as Michel Serres have made extensive use of the idea of the clinamen, albeit with very different readings.

However, by the time of Lucretius, the purely mechanist account was supplemented, (for example, by the clinamen of Epicurus), and in stoic physics, the warm, wet biogenetic breath of life, pneuma, would assume the role of logos... interpenetrating and organizing both the animal psyche, and all matter in the cosmos.