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Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and
other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based
forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward,
fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across
wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the
surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and
metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are
they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of
plants—in lived experience; in landscape painting; in cultivation
and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities?
Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a
collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of
Edward S. Casey’s phenomenology of place and Michael Marder’s
plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic
constitution of plant edges or a child’s engagement with moss and
the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees.
This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides
readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of
vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the
book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our
understanding and experience of place more broadly.
Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and
other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based
forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward,
fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across
wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the
surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and
metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are
they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of
plants—in lived experience; in landscape painting; in cultivation
and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities?
Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a
collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of
Edward S. Casey’s phenomenology of place and Michael Marder’s
plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic
constitution of plant edges or a child’s engagement with moss and
the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees.
This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides
readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of
vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the
book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our
understanding and experience of place more broadly.
Green Mass is a meditation on—and with—twelfth-century
Christian mystic and polymath Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Attending
to Hildegard's vegetal vision, which greens theological tradition
and imbues plant life with spirit, philosopher Michael Marder
uncovers a verdant mode of thinking. The book stages a fresh
encounter between present-day and premodern concerns, ecology and
theology, philosophy and mysticism, the material and the spiritual,
in word and sound. Hildegard's lush notion of viriditas, the
vegetal power of creation, is emblematic of her deeply entwined
understanding of physical reality and spiritual elevation. From
blossoming flora to burning desert, Marder plays with the symphonic
multiplicity of meanings in her thought, listening to the
resonances between the ardency of holy fire and the aridity of a
world aflame. Across Hildegard's cosmos, we hear the anarchic
proliferation of her ecological theology, in which both God and
greening are circular, without beginning or end. Introduced with a
foreword by philosopher Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and
accompanied by cellist Peter Schuback's musical movements, which
echo both Hildegard's own compositions and key themes in each
chapter of the book, this multifaceted work creates a resonance
chamber, in which to discover the living world anew. The original
compositions accompanying each chapter are available free for
streaming and for download at www.sup.org/greenmass
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.
Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael
Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal,
philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the
vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with
human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to
rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon
past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has
argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are
deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial
dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is
true for vegetal difference. Irigaray and Marder consider how
plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing,
nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They
note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and
engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to
nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced
and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and
relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more
universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal
world.
The question of energy is among the most vital for the future of
humanity and the flourishing of life on this planet. Yet, only very
rarely (if at all) do we ask what energy is, what it means, what
ends it serves, and how it is related to actuality, meaning-making,
and instrumentality. Energy Dreams interrogates the ontology of
energy from the first coinage of the word energeia by Aristotle to
the current practice of fracking and the popularity of "energy
drinks." Its sustained, multi-disciplinary investigation builds a
theoretical infrastructure for an alternative energy paradigm. This
study unhinges stubbornly held assumptions about energy, conceived
in terms of a resource to be violently extracted from the depths of
the earth and from certain living beings (such as plants, converted
into biofuels), a thing that, teetering on the verge of depletion,
sparks off movement and is incompatible with the inertia of rest.
Consulting the insights of philosophers, theologians, psychologists
and psychoanalysts, economic and political theorists, and
physicists, Michael Marder argues that energy is not only a coveted
object of appropriation but also the subject who dreams of amassing
it; that it not only resides in the dimension of depth but also
circulates on the surface; that it activates rest as much as
movement, potentiality as much as actuality; and that it is both
the means and the end of our pursuits. Ultimately, Marder shows
that, instead of being grounded in utopian naivete, the dreams of
another energy-to be procured without devastating everything in
existence-derive from the suppressed concept of energy itself.
Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit has been one of the most
important works of philosophy since the nineteenth century, while
the question of energy has been crucial to life in the twenty-first
century. In this book, Michael Marder integrates the two, narrating
a story about the trials and tribulations of energy embedded in
Hegel's dialectics. Through an original interpretation of actuality
(Wirklichkeit) as energy in the Hegelian corpus, the book provides
an exciting lens for understanding the dialectical project and the
energy-starved condition of our contemporaneity. To elaborate this
theory, Marder undertakes a meticulous rereading of major parts of
the Phenomenology, where the energy deficit of mere consciousness
gives way to the energy surplus of self-consciousness and its
self-delimitation in the domain of reason. In so doing, he
denounces the current understanding of energy as pure potentiality,
linking this mindset to pollution, profit-driven economies, and
environmental crises. Surprising and deeply engaged with its
contemporary implications, this book doesn't simply illuminate
aspects of The Phenomenology of Spirit - it provides an entirely
new understanding of Hegel's ideas.
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Tomas Saraceno (Paperback)
Tomas Saraceno; Text written by Italo Calvino, Jussi Parikka, Michael Marder, Franklin Ginn, …
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R888
Discovery Miles 8 880
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Western philosophy has been dominated by the concept or the
idea-the belief that there is one sovereign notion or singular
principle that can make reality explicable and bring all that
exists under its sway. In modern politics, this role is played by
ideology. Left, right, or center, political schools of thought
share a metaphysics of simplification. We internalize a dominant,
largely unnoticeable framework, oblivious to complex, plural, and
occasionally conflicting or mutually contradictory explanations for
what is the case. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Marder
proposes a new methodology for political science and philosophy,
one which he terms "categorial thinking." In contrast to the
concept, no category alone can exhaust the meaning of anything:
categories are so many folds, complications, respectful of
multiplicity. Ranging from classical Aristotelian and Kantian
philosophies to phenomenology and contemporary politics, Marder's
book offers readers a theoretical toolbox for the interpretation of
political phenomena, processes, institutions, and ideas. His
categorial apparatus encompasses political temporality and
spatiality; the revolutionary and conservative modalities of
political actuality, possibility, and necessity; quantitative and
qualitative approaches to the study of political reality; the
meaning of political relations; and various senses of political
being. Under this lens, the political appears not as a singular
concept but as a family of categories, allowing room for new,
plural, and often antagonistic ideas about the state, the people,
sovereignty, and power.
Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers
have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction,
and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants
in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and
other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers,
trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal,
dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants.
In this book, Michael Marder illuminates the elaborate vegetal
centerpieces and hidden kernels that have powered theoretical
discourse for centuries. Choosing twelve botanical specimens that
correspond to twelve significant philosophers, he recasts the
development of philosophy through the evolution of human and plant
relations. A philosophical history for the postmetaphysical age,
The Philosopher's Plant reclaims the organic heritage of human
thought. With the help of vegetal images, examples, and metaphors,
the book clears a path through philosophy's tangled roots and dense
undergrowth, opening up the discipline to all readers.
With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts
from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the
outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes
on the basis of sexuate difference.
From books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to
self-immolations at protest rallies, from the burning of fossil
fuels to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary
sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings
and "scorched earth" policy, fire proves to be an indispensable
element of the political. Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze builds
upon the scintillating, by turns horrifying and hopeful, images and
realities of flames, hearths, sparks, immolations, melting pots,
incinerations, and burning in political thought and practices.
Relying on classical political theory, theology, philosophy,
literature and cinema, as well as an analysis of current events,
Michael Marder argues that geo-politics, or the politics of the
Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding,
underside-pyro-politics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure
double of geopolitics is increasingly dictating the rules of the
game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to
discern its manifestations and to project where our world ablaze is
heading.
Ranging across philosophy, theology, ecology, psychology, and art,
in Dump Philosophy Michael Marder argues that the earth, along with
everything that lives and thinks on it, is at an advanced stage of
being converted into a dump for industrial output and its
by-products feeding consumerism and its excesses. Every day,
scientific studies, media reports, and first-hand accounts of the
rapidly deteriorating state of the environment hit us with a
growing and disconcerting force. Trends such as microplastics in
water, airborne toxins, topsoil degradation, and dangerous levels
of carbon dioxide have upset the delicate ecological balance that
has until now been sustaining life on the planet. Marder's original
treatise paints a portrait of the Anthropocene as a global dump
which wreaks havoc, causing disease and degrading our sensation,
perception, and thinking, so that nuance is lost and ideas are
reduced to soundbites in chains of free association. Describing the
dump's fundamental characteristics and its effects on the body and
the mind, he contemplates wider physiological, social, economic,
and environmental metabolisms in the age of dumping, as well as the
role of philosophy caught in its crosshairs. While surveying the
devastation that is the reality of the twenty-first century, the
book provides a frightening and yet intellectually spellbinding
glimpse of the future.
From books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to
self-immolations at protest rallies, from the burning of fossil
fuels to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary
sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings
and "scorched earth" policy, fire proves to be an indispensable
element of the political. Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze builds
upon the scintillating, by turns horrifying and hopeful, images and
realities of flames, hearths, sparks, immolations, melting pots,
incinerations, and burning in political thought and practices.
Relying on classical political theory, theology, philosophy,
literature and cinema, as well as an analysis of current events,
Michael Marder argues that geo-politics, or the politics of the
Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding,
underside-pyro-politics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure
double of geopolitics is increasingly dictating the rules of the
game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to
discern its manifestations and to project where our world ablaze is
heading.
Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael
Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal,
philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the
vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with
human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to
rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon
past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has
argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are
deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial
dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is
true for vegetal difference. Irigaray and Marder consider how
plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing,
nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They
note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and
engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to
nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced
and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and
relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more
universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal
world.
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Dust (Paperback)
Michael Marder
1
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R304
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
Save R52 (17%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books
about the hidden lives of ordinary things. No matter how much you
fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even
layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage
of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random
community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of
traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen,
hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their
home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the
dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and
the world ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return").
This book treats one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena,
showing how it can provide a key to thinking about existence,
community, and justice today. Object Lessons is published in
partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts
from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the
outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes
on the basis of sexuate difference.
The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World is an
interdisciplinary collection of essays in the emerging field of
Plant Studies. The volume is the first of its kind to bring
together a dynamic body of scholarship that shares a critique of
long-standing human perceptions of plants as lacking autonomy,
agency, consciousness, and, intelligence. The leading metaphor of
the book-"the green thread", echoing poet Dylan Thomas' phrase "the
green fuse"-carries multiple meanings. On a more apparent level,
"the green thread" is what weaves together the diverse approaches
of this collection: an interest in the vegetal that goes beyond
single disciplines and specialist discourses, and one that not only
encourages but necessitates interdisciplinary and even interspecies
dialogue. On another level, "the green thread" links creative and
historical productions to the materiality of the vegetal-a reality
reflecting our symbiosis with oxygen-producing beings. In short,
The Green Thread refers to the conversations about plants that
transcend strict disciplinary boundaries as well as to the
possibility of dialogue with plants.
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