Through Vegetal Being by Luce Irigaray

Through Vegetal Being by Luce Irigaray

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.

Through Vegetal Being foregrounds the relations that plants enable between humans and other living things, continuing both Michael Marder's work on plant existence and Luce Irigaray's work on sexual difference and the forgetting of the world in the constitution of individual identityThis charming and beautifully written book is a two-person meditation on the philosophy, ontology, and ethics of plant life and our fundamental dependence on it as living beings. -- Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor at Duke University Through Vegetal Being explores what the vegetal realm can offer to philosophy and the tradition of western metaphysics. The two voices in dialogue-legendary feminist thinker Luce Irigaray and acclaimed philosopher Michael Marder-engage the critique of metaphysics from a perspective that is largely without precedent, thus cross pollinating between such intellectual fields as continental philosophy, environmentalism, gardening, and botany. -- William Egginton, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder have written an admirable and singular book, where they recover two aspects of philosophy that have been otherwise forgotten. On the one hand, they return to a reflection on our condition as living beings, the context in which and thanks to which we exist. On the other hand, their method is an epistolary dialogue, a genre that has given us some of the most profound and least abstract insights along the history of philosophy. -- Daniel Innerarity, author of Governance in the New Global Disorder Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder surprise us with a moving foray into life in its barest, elemental traits. By tapping into the pulse and silent language shared by all animate beings, they unsettle received philosophical narratives and awaken modes of sensibility both subtle and expanded. The contact with the mystery of vegetal life renews the investigation into human becoming, its potentiality and cultivation. -- Claudia Baracchi, University of Milano-Bicocca

Luce Irigaray is director of research in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She is the author of more than thirty books, the most recent of which are Sharing the World and In the Beginning, She Was. Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Among his books are Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life and The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780231173872
ISBN 10	0231173873
Title	Through Vegetal Being
Author	Luce Irigaray
Series	Critical Life Studies
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Columbia University Press
Year published	2016-07-05
Number of pages	248
Prizes	Winner of ICA Book of the Year 2016 2016
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable