The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of instrumentality. Reconstructing the life of plants "after metaphysics," Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, "plant-thinking" is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.
- Contents
- Foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: To Encounter the Plants . . .
- PART I: VEGETAL ANTI-METAPHYSICS
- 1. The Soul of the Plant or, The Meanings of Vegetal Life
- The Obscurity of Vegetal Life: On Barely Perceptible Motion
- The Potentialities of Plants; or, The Vicissitudes of Nourishment
- On “The Common”: Modes of Living and the Shared Soul
- 2. The Body of the Plant or, The Destruction of the Metaphysical Paradigm
- Back to the Middle: The Inversions of the Plant
- Vegetal Heteronomy
- The Language of Plants and Essential Superficiality: An Approach to Vegetal Being
- PART II: VEGETAL EXISTENTIALITY
- 3. The Time of Plants
- Plant-Time (I): Vegetal Hetero-Temporality
- Plant-Time (II): The “Bad Infinity” of Growth
- Plant-Time (III): The Iterability of Expression
- 4. The Freedom of Plants
- The Shape of Freedom
- Vegetal Indifference
- A Tale of Two Freedoms
- 5. The Wisdom of Plants
- Non-Conscious Intentionality
- Thinking Without Identity
- Philosophy, A Sublimated Plant-Thinking
- Epilogue: The Ethical Offshoots of Plant-Thinking
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
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