Michael Marder - Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life [2013][A]

Book Description
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.

Reviews
A superbly presented seminal work... Highly recommended. Midwest Book Review Marder Profoundly original. Choice 9/1/2013

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 4/10/2013

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 Nov 2013 Life-changing Bangalore Review Vol 1, No 6

About the Author
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV-EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He is the author of The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium; The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism; Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt; Phenomena -- Critique -- Logos: The Project of Critical Phenomenology; and the forthcoming Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze.