Michael Marder

Is love when you don’t give a name to things’ identity? The Passion According to G.H., like much of Clarice Lispector’s writing, hovers on the razor-thin and fragile edge between description and the ineffable, between existence and nonexistence, between the world and its disappearance, between losing and finding oneself. It is no wonder, then, that a plethora of contradictions explode from the very first lines of the narrative that passionately wishes to share an obscure experience, of which the narrator herself is not certain—“I am not sure I even believe in what happened to me,” she says (p. 3)1—and which she is unable to organize into clearly delineated forms or molds, without losing its singularly ..

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.

In contrast to the legal, metaphysically laden, and epistemological paradigms, the ontological interpretation of respect concerns not only the relation between the “subject” and the “object” (or, better, the provider and the recipient, of this attitude) but also the being of the respected and the respecting. This paper develops an ontology of respect with regard to the human treatment of plants and teases out the meanings of vegetal life that germinate in this relation. What is at stake, I claim, is not so much an objective ontology as the phenomenological disclosure of the meanings of human and vegetal lives, construed “from within,” i.e., both in the context of the interactions between them and from the unique standpoint proper to each kind of being. Far from an ethical supplement to a theoretical description of vegetal beings, respect is the prism through which we may first gain access to plant ontology.

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 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

Disentangling Complexio OppositorumCarl Schmitt's Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) features a term, the importance of which political philosophy has yet to fathom. This notion is complexio oppositorum, describing Catholicism as “a complex of opposites”: “There appears to be no antithesis it [Roman Catholicism] does not embrace. It has long and proudly claimed to have united within itself all forms of state and government.…But this complexio oppositorum also holds sway over everything theological.”1 The striking depth and breadth of the complex are already evident in this brief passage. Broadly speaking, its elastic form—and more needs to be said on…

Two fires are kindled at the threshold of the metaphysical era, and both are extinguished, almost simultaneously, as soon as metaphysics exhausts itself in its final Nietzschean inversion. The political reality of the twenty-first century is, as a whole, a comet tail of these ancient blazes that, until recently, seemed to be older than time itself, gave the impression of being eternal, undying, inextinguishable. How to find one's bearings among the cinders and ashes of what the flames consumed? How to make sense—if make sense we must—of the burnt and smoldering remains,…