Michael Marder, “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life” (Columbia UP, 2013)
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What is the central thesis of Michael Marder’s *Plant‑Thinking*?
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor of the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese of Vanderbilt. In our bi-monthly podcasts, we interview philosophers about their new books in ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and many other areas. Today's interview is with Michael Marder, Iker Basque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in the Basque Autonomous Region of Spain. We're talking about his new book, Plant Thinking, A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, just out from Columbia University Press. if animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of western thought the non-human non-animal living beings such as plants have populated the margin of the margin a zone of absolute obscurity in which their mode of existence from a philosophical perspective is not even questionworthy
So writes Martyr in the start of his new book, Plant Thinking, a book in which the metaphor of groundbreaking has actually never been so apt. Contrasting his view with the Aristotelian perspective, in which plants are basically defective animals, Martyr initiates inquiry into the nature of vegetal life on its own terms, and into how human life currently encounters, and how it should encounter, this radically foreign mode of existence. Marder's goal is nothing less than a sort of Nietzschean revaluation of values when it comes to vegetal life. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Michael Marder.
Hello. Hello, Kerry.
Hi. How are you?
I'm fine, thank you. How are you?
Good. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Thank you. It's very good to be talking to you, Kerry.
I'm very excited about talking about your new book, Plant Thinking, A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. The term groundbreaking has probably never been so apt, I think. And at the very beginning of the book, you sort of start out with a very apt quote, I thought, saying that if animals have suffered from marginalization throughout the history of Western thought... then non-human, non-animal living beings such as plants have populated the margin of the margin. And this book, of course, as I understand it, aims to kind of upend that attitude and provide a sort of revaluation of the nature of plant life and then, in consequence, our own relationship to plant life, vegetal life. So before we get into the book itself, it'd be great if you could give us a little background on your own philosophical career and how you came to write this book.
Right. Thank you, Kerry. So at least as far as I can tell, and in these questions, sometimes an outside perspective is indispensable or even more important. There is no direct link between my earlier work in philosophy and my interest in plant life. My first book was a discussion of the notion of the thing in Derrida's deconstruction, and I particularly worked there from the phenomenological perspective. even though it was not the traditional classical phenomenology, which is oriented toward the human experience of the world. The second monograph was on the phenomenological, once again, and existential phenomena underpinnings of Carl Schmitt's political philosophy. And so much of my work until planned thinking has been situated at the intersection of phenomenology and political philosophy.
But as I mentioned, this was not really a very traditional human-centered phenomenology. So what I found out from my study of Derrida's writings on the thing is that It turned out to be something very strange. It turned out to be neither animate nor inanimate. It kind of displayed an intentionality of its own and aimed at us while before and after we tried to grasp it or tried to direct ourselves to it. So it had to do quite a bit with the phenomenology of non-human existences, sometimes what we consider to be even inanimate existences. And so that led to a kind of broad interest in the intentionalities of other modes of existence and forms of life than our own.
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