Plant-Thinking - by Michael Marder (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A superbly presented seminal work.... Highly recommended.-- "Midwest Book Review"

Anyone can find something of note or amusement here.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Life-changing-- "Bangalore Review"

Michael Marder's book Plant-Thinking is a timely contribution to the project of expanding ethical considerations to non-human beings.... This is a strong contribution to the post-metaphysical project.-- "Canadian Philosophical Review"

Profoundly original-- "Choice"

We owe Marder...a great debt for widening the contemporary philosophical discussion of life and ethics, taking it into the plant kingdom.--Jeffrey T. Nealon "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"

About the Author

Michael Marder (PhD, Philosophy, the New School) is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country. He is the author of, among other books, Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (Continuum, 2012), The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism (Toronto, 2013), Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia, 2013), The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Columbia, 2014), Energy Dreams (Columbia, 2017), and, with Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (Columbia, 2016).