Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life — Michael Marder
(reading notes from Plant-Thinking A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by MICHAEL MARDER)
If, as it seems, there is a correspondence between the liberal capitalist states and metaphysical philosophical impositions that consider the environment as something that must be manipulated for our own purposes, philosophy has the obligation to break this deplorable alliance.
The violence of systems is often expressed through metaphysical impositions, which aim to submit everything to their own measures, standards, and agendas. But as the philosophy of the “weak” (which claims the right of the oppressed to interpret, vote, and live), weak thought not only follows a logic of resistance, but also promotes a progressive weakening of the strong structures of metaphysics. Weakening, like deconstruction, does not search for correct solutions wherein thought may finally come to rest, but rather seeks ontological emancipation from truth and other concepts that frame and restrict the possibilities of new philosophical, scientific, or religious revolutions.
thinking is no longer demonstrative, but edifying, conversational, and interpretative.
1. The Soul of the Plant; or, The Meanings of Vegetal Life
Vegetal activity encrypts itself in its modes of appearance by presenting itself in the guise of passivity, which is to say, by never presenting itself as such.
It is an obscure non-object: obscure, because it ineluctably withdraws, flees from sight and from rigorous interpretation; non-object, because it works outside, before, and beyond all subjective considerations and representations.