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Clinamen (gen
Genitive case

In grammar, the genitive case or possessive case is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun but it can also indicate various relationships other than possession; certain verbs may take argument in the genitive case; and it may have adverbial uses ....
.: clinaminis) is the name Lucretius
Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman Republic poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem on Epicureanism De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things....
 gave to a minimal indeterminacy in the motions of atoms, an unpredictable ‘swerve... at no fixed place or time’. This indeterminacy, according to Lucretius, prevents us from being 'automata'. The clinamen designates the ‘smallest possible angle’ by which an atom deviates from the straight line of the fall of the atoms through a laminar void; an ‘infinitely small deviation' that marks the beginning of the world as atomic turbulence.

According to Lucretius, there would be no contact between atoms without the clinamen; and so, "No collision would take place and no impact of atom upon atom would be created.






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Clinamen (gen
Genitive case

In grammar, the genitive case or possessive case is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun but it can also indicate various relationships other than possession; certain verbs may take argument in the genitive case; and it may have adverbial uses ....
.: clinaminis) is the name Lucretius
Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman Republic poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem on Epicureanism De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things....
 gave to a minimal indeterminacy in the motions of atoms, an unpredictable ‘swerve... at no fixed place or time’. This indeterminacy, according to Lucretius, prevents us from being 'automata'. The clinamen designates the ‘smallest possible angle’ by which an atom deviates from the straight line of the fall of the atoms through a laminar void; an ‘infinitely small deviation' that marks the beginning of the world as atomic turbulence.

According to Lucretius, there would be no contact between atoms without the clinamen; and so, "No collision would take place and no impact of atom upon atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything." (2.220-225). It must be observed that Lucretian clinamen concept was based in Epicurus
Epicureanism

Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus , founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomism materialism, following in the steps of Democritus....
' atomistic doctrine.

The clinamen has been taken up in discussions of determinism as a possible explanation for an incompatibilist free will.

The term has also been taken up by Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an United States author, intellectual and literary critic. Bloom defended 19th-century Romanticism poets at a time when their reputations stood at a low ebb, has constructed controversial theories of poetic influence, and advocates an aesthetic approach to literature against Feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary...
 to describe the inclinations of writers to "swerve" from the influence of their predecessors; it is the first of his "Ratios of Revision" as described in The Anxiety of Influence
The Anxiety of Influence

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is a book by Harold Bloom, published in 1973 in literature. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new "revisionary" or antithetical approach to literary criticism....
.

In Difference and Repetition
Difference and Repetition

Difference and Repetition is a 1968 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze which concerns the study of difference and repetition. It was Gilles Deleuze's doctoral thesis....
, Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosophy of the late 20th century. From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art....
 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."(184) 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 "Introduction to Civil War" , the French collective Tiqqun claims that "each body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen; a penchant; a leaning; an attraction; a taste. What a body leans towards also leans towards it; this goes for each and every situation: all inclinations are reciprocal."

Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a France philosophy born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction, which was originally a translation of a Heideggerian term from Being and Time, also translated as 'De-structuring'....
 as well as Michel Serres
Michel Serres

Michel Serres is a France philosopher and author, celebrated for his unusual career.Born the son of a barge man, Serres entered the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure in 1952....
 have made extensive use of the idea of the clinamen, albeit with very different readings.

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