Michael Marder: Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013)

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.

With a Foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 2013
ISBN 0231161255, 9780231161251
248 pages

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Roberto Esposito: The Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal (2007/2012)

All discourses aimed at asserting the value of human life as such–whether philosophical, ethical, or political–assume the notion of personhood as their indispensable point of departure. This is all the more true today. In bioethics, for example, Catholic and secular thinkers may disagree on what constitutes a person and its genesis, but they certainly agree on its decisive importance: human life is considered to be untouchable only when based on personhood. In the legal sphere as well the enjoyment of subjective rights continues to be increasingly linked to the qualification of personhood, which appears to be the only one capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, right and life, and soul and body opened up at the very origins of Western civilization.

The radical and alarming thesis put forward in this book is that the notion of person is unable to bridge this gap because it is precisely what creates this breach. Its primary effect is to create a separation in both the human race and the individual between a rational, voluntary part endowed with particular value and another, purely biological part that is thrust by the first into the inferior dimension of the animal or the thing. In opposition to the performative power of the person, whose dual origins can be traced back to ancient Rome and Christianity, Esposito pursues his strikingly original and innovative philosophical inquiry by inviting reflection on the category of the impersonal: the third person, in removing itself from the exclusionary mechanism of the person, points toward the orginary unity of the living being.

First published in Italian as Terza Persona, Giulio Einaudi, 2007
Translated by Zakiya Hanafi
Publisher Polity, 2012
ISBN 0745643981, 9780745643984
200 pages

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Cary Wolfe: Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003)

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Žižek, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, Wolfe explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”

With a Foreword by W.J.T. Mitchell
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2003
ISBN 0226905144, 9780226905143
237 pages

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