Michael Marder

ExcerptThis issue of Telos explores the contours of politics after metaphysics as the horizon for an appropriate response to today's unabating politico-economic crisis. Profound challenges to core institutions of modernity—free-market economy, political liberalism, and parliamentary democracy—have emerged: the expansion of the state into civil society, the subordination of rights to security, and the growth of executive authority. Critical Theory developed, historically, in response to what Max Horkheimer labeled the “authoritarian state,” which has now overflowed the limits of the national polity and permeated the fabric of transnational financial and political institutions. That is where we ought to seek the common…

In this text, I suggest that we approach the theme of “the event” through vegetal processes, concepts, and metaphors. Mediated through plant life, the event unfolds along three axes: 1) that of excrescence, or the out-growth, which is how plants appear in the world; 2) that of expectation, or the out-look, waiting for germination and ultimately for fruition; and 3) that of the exception, or the out-take, which extracts the seed from the closed circuit of potentiality and actuality, committing it to chance. The nascent model I propose sheds light on our animalist prejudices hidden in ostensibly abstract thought and offers a fresh starting point for postmetaphysical ontology

This essay approaches the Hegelian problem of giving and givenness through the marginal figures of the animal, the child, and “superstitious humanity,”representing, in one way or another, the unperturbed relationship with immediacy. I argue that, for Hegel, the process of subjectivization supersedes these figures by learning to reject the immediately given and to accept only what is self-given. Yet, interspersed throughout this process are various imbalances and asymmetries, whereby the subject gives itself more than it takes, undialectically suppressing the particular and displacing the marginal.

ABSTRACT: This article examines the possibility of an ethical treatment of plants grounded in empathy. Upon considering whether an empathetic approach to vegetal life is compatible with the crucial features of plant ontology, it is concluded that the feeling of empathy with plants disregards their mode of being and projects the constructs and expectations of the human empathizer onto the object of empathy. Vegetal life, thus, reveals the limits of empathy, as well as its anthropocentric and potentially unethical underpinnings. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.The Life of Plants and the Limits of EmpathyVolume 51, Issue 2Michael Marder DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000431Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. The Life of Plants and the Limits of EmpathyVolume 51, Issue 2Michael Marder DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000431Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. The Life of Plants and the Limits of EmpathyVolume 51, Issue 2Michael Marder DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000431Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission.

In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies of history in terms of the persistence of forgetting within memory. In section I, I shall outline the totalizing production of history understood as an unsuccessful attempt to erase the indifference of animality and the difference of madness. The following two sections are concerned with the particular kinds of non-subjective memories—memorials—that arise in the aftermath of this erasure and include writing and the archive, as well as the ghostly and genealogical confusions. Throughout these sections I shall argue that each of the externalizations of memory in non-subjective memorials is contaminated by forgetting, both shaping and shaking up the foundations of history. Finally, section IV revisits the memorials and states of forgetting discussed in the previous sections in light of the possibility of justice.

Radical political thought of the 20th century was dominated by utopia, but the failure of communism in Eastern Europe and its disavowal in China has brought on the need for a new model of utopian thought. This book thus seeks to redefine the concept of utopia and bring it to bear on today's politics. The original essays, contributed by key thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo and Jean-Luc Nancy, highlight the connection between utopian theory and practice. The book reassesses the legacy of utopia and conceptualizes alternatives to the neo-liberal, technocratic regimes prevalent in today's world. It argues that only utopia in its existential sense, grounded in the lived time and space of politics, can distance itself from mainstream ideology and not be at the service of technocratic regimes, while paying attention to the material conditions of human life. Existential Utopia offers a new and exciting interpretation of utopia in contemporary culture and a much-needed intervention into the philosophical and political discussion of utopian thinking that is both accessible to students and comprehensive.

In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies of history in terms of the persistence of forgetting within (non-subjective) memory. In section I, I shall outline the totalizing production of history understood as an unsuccessful attempt to erase the indifference of animality and the difference of madness. The following two sections are concerned with the particular kinds of non-subjective memories—memorials—that arise in the aftermath of this erasure and include writing and the archive (section II), as well as the ghostly and genealogical confusions (section III). Throughout these sections I shall argue that each of the externalizations of memory in non-subjective memorials is contaminated by forgetting, both shaping and shaking up the foundations of history. Finally, section IV revisits the memorials and states of forgetting discussed in the previous sections in light of the (im)possibility of justice.

Carl Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) features a term, the importance of which political philosophy is yet to fathom. This notion is complexio oppositorum, describing Catholicism as “a complex of opposites”. Upon theorizing the complex as a non-dialectical, non-synthetical unity, I will graft its structure onto the concept of culture and its recent political incarnation, multiculturalism. I will argue that in order to remain a viable political concept, multiculturalism has to preserve an antagonistic composition, which will allow for 1) a concretion of the Schmittian understanding of culture as a plurality and 2) a non-consensusbased process of negotiating cultural co-existence.

Do we face a new rule of lawlessness? On the high seas, in matters of international law and human rights, and even in domestic prosecutorial practices, any grounds to place one's trust in the lawfulness of order seem increasingly elusive. The New World Order appears to be no order at all; the century of secular universalisms leaves us in the state of a general and all-encompassing nihilism. Still, rather than signaling a dead end rife with global despair, the collapse of everything that went under the name of the New World Order could be a harbinger of ample opportunities for…

This essay approaches the Hegelian problem of giving and givenness through the marginal figures of the animal, the child, and “superstitious humanity,”representing, in one way or another, the unperturbed relationship with immediacy. I argue that, for Hegel, the process of subjectivization supersedes these figures by learning to reject the immediately given and to accept only what is self-given. Yet, interspersed throughout this process are various imbalances and asymmetries, whereby the subject gives itself more than it takes, undialectically suppressing the particular and displacing the marginal.

Drawing on the texts of Martin Heidegger, at times interpreted against the grain, I tackle the relation between ecology and economy in our era of rampant economism. I begin by outlining the ecological and economic variations on ethics and politics, with the view to the logos and nomos of dwelling (oikos). Thereafter, I consider the rise of a worldless, homeless world from the undue emphasis placed on nomos, which is but the active (actively gathering) dimension of logos. This lopsidedness, I argue, coincides with and is reinforced by the deterioration of ontological rank to valuation and, ultimately, to numeric orderability. Further, I focus on the excesses of a purely economist comportment that, emboldened by the inflation of nomos, devastates “economy” itself from within by converting the elemental fold for dwelling first into a manageable territory and finally into an empire. I conclude with the thesis that things, sharply contrasted to objects, maintain the possibility of an ecological existence, recalling us to the lost dwelling.

Mountain peaks, like all uninhabitable and barely accessible environments, stand in the way of a clear-cut distinction between “place” and “space.” Building on the environmental thought of Aldo Leopold, as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century phenomenology, I draw attention to this obscure in-between region and argue that the conceptual distinction must be subject to careful adumbration, depending on the concrete place where it is employed. Subsequently, mountains are theorized as the sites of friction between earth and world, where sovereign authority and objectivizing thinking are equally suspended.

In this paper, I propose an ontological-hermeneutical approach to the question of vegetative life. I argue that, though it is a product of the metaphysical traditionthat from Aristotle to Nietzsche ascribes to the life of plants but a single function, the notion of plant-soul is useful for the formulation of a post-metaphysicalphilosophy of vegetation. Offered as a prolegomenon to such thinking about plants, this paper focuses on the multiplicity of meanings, the obscurity, and thepotentialities inherent in their life