This article examines the creation of words in De Rerum Natura through a close reading of two extended passages concerning the problem of where words come from and what they do. The first is the account of speech production, work entrusted to the daedala lingua in Book 4. This physiological process is mimicked at the phylogenic level in the discussion on the origins of language in Book 5, where voice is first shaped by a body responding to the impact of objects, then by utilitas. The adjective daedalus and the intervention of utilitas both signal, I argue, a shift away from an understanding of language as reaction towards an understanding of language as fabrication, a shift with important implications for the relationship of words to the world they represent.

Homer-or the ancient oral bards who bear his name-dismembered the human body with loving inventiveness. What such moments rarely contain, however, is an extended description of anguish or agony. Homeric warriors normally expire all at once in a black mist or in a bone-crunching clatter of armor; they groan, gasp, and vomit blood; but…they seldom die in pain. (41) The claim that pain is an element foreign to the Iliad's numerous accounts of death may seem, at first glance, unlikely. As Morris notes, battlefield carnage is vividly described. Weapons in the nearly 150 accounts of both fatal and non-fatal wounding refer to a corporeal topography so precise that scholars once hypothesized that Homer must have had some connection to the medical profession, if he was not, in fact, a surgeon himself. 1 The threat of violent penetration is constant: Hector hopes that Achilles will literally incorporate his spear (…w dAE min s" §n xro˛ pçn komÄ isaio, Il. 22.286 ), and he threatens Ajax: "my long spear…will bite your delicate body" (a ‡ ke talãss˙w / me›nai §mÚn dÒru makrÒn, ˜ toi xrÒa leiriÒenta / dãcei, 13.829-31). 2 Yet it is true that when a warrior falls, we hear these boasts and taunts, rather than the noise of pain. These are not opportunities for the epic poet to focalize the experience of the warrior. The dying hero is halfway to becoming a shade, halfway to becoming a corpse: the capacity for omniscient narration to speak from within is quickly disappearing. On the exceptional occasions when the fading warrior does speak, what bridges the gap between the hero and the dead man is not pain but prescience: Patroclus foresees the death of Hector, in addition to gaining more-than-mortal insight into the conditions of his own; Hector, in turn, prophesies the death of Achilles. 3 Suffering, we might conclude, belongs to the psuchê, which leaves the limbs, then hovers over them briefly to lament the loss of youth and manliness (cuxØ dÉ §k =ey°vn ptam°nh ÖAÛdÒsde bebAEkei, / ˘n pÒtmon goÒvsa, lipoËsÉ éndrot∞ta ka‹ ¥bhn, 16. 856-57, 22.362-63).What Morris finds lacking in Homer's descriptions of death is not simply pain but, more precisely, a narrative interest in odunai (the word is typically found in the plural), the pains most closely associated with violence

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

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