From Marx to Freud via Epicurus: Materialism and Psychoanalysis

At the invitation of the Research Group for General Literary Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at ELTE, Professor Dimitris Vardoulakis from Western Sydney University, Australia will give a lecture at our Faculty entitled From Marx to Freud via Epicurus: Materialism and Psychoanalysis.

"I will start by discussing two factually wrong interpretations of the clinamen in Marx’s dissertation and in Deleuze’s essay on Lucretius. The errors here are less important than the desire to determine a politically committed materialism that addresses social relations. Differently put, the errors are symptomatic of the early Marx’s and Deleuze’s political commitments. After exploring the source of the mistake in the “Latin Culture” that Marx was imbued in, I will show that in fact he rectifies the mistaken interpretation later on, in the most unexpected of places. It may come as a surprise that a key premise of Marx’s solution is shared with psychoanalysis. This shows, I argue, that Marx and Freud’s ideas are not sui generis but in fact partake of a long tradition that stretches back to Epicureanism. By contrast, Deleuze’s position represses one key move characteristic of Epicurus. This has major implications about how we can think today about politics."

Professor Dimitris Vardoulakis holds a PhD in Philosophy from Monash University (Melbourne). He was the inaugural chair of the Philosophy Department at Western Sydney University. He has also served as the president of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (2019–24) and is currently Vice President of the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia.

Vardoulakis is an internationally recognized scholar. He has been invited to give talks at Universities around the world, and has held visiting professorships in the US (such as a regular visiting professorship at Columbia University for four years), Europe (such as a regular visiting professorship at Panteion University, Athens, ongoing) and China.

Known for a body of work that crosses the boundaries between philosophy and literary theory, the history of thought and political theory, Vardoulakis is the author of eight monographs. In Sovereignty and its Other (Fordham UP, 2013) he shows how literature challenges rigid conceptions of sovereignty in the history of thought. In Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (SUNY, 2016), he shows that Kafka’s narratives in which a protagonist is invariably imprisoned are in fact profound philosophical meditations on freedom.

For the past few years, Vardoulakis has concentrated on how it is possible to conceive of an ethics and a politics within a materialist philosophy. Vardoulakis' last book, The Agonistic Condition: Democracy and Materialism (Edinburgh UP, 2025) focuses on the political – as opposed to the ethical – implications of materialism through an engagement with both political theory and the figures that greatly influenced it, such as Nietzsche, Schmitt and Arendt.