•  8
    Exilic Ecologies
    Philosophies 8 (5): 95. 2023.
    A term of relatively recent mintage, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology draws on ancient Greek to establish and consolidate its meaning. Although scholars all too often overlook it, the anachronistic rise of ecology in its semantic and conceptual determinations is noteworthy. Formed by analogy with economy, the word may be translated as “the articulation of a dwelling”, the logos of oikos. Here, I argue not only that a vast majority of ecosystems on the planet are subject …Read more
  •  3
    Heidegger Tonight: A Philosophical Dialogue
    Diacritics 50 (2): 26-37. 2022.
    Abstract:Michael Marder and Giovanbattista Tusa discuss the "today" and "tonight" in Heidegger's thinking and beyond.
  •  3
    Time Is a Plant
    BRILL. 2023.
    A far-reaching reformulation of the philosophy of time guided by vegetal processes, rhythms, tempos, and shapes.
  •  1
    Chapter Twelve From Plant Thinking
    In Giovanni Aloi & Susan McHugh (eds.), Posthumanism in art and science: a reader, Columbia University Press. pp. 87-90. 2020.
  •  6
    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…Read more
  •  3
    Energy Dreams: Of Actuality
    Columbia University Press. 2017.
    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-disciplina…Read more
  •  3
    Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts
    Columbia University Press. 2018.
    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 exp…Read more
  •  3
    Building a new world: Luce Irigaray: teaching II (edited book)
    Palgrave-Macmillan. 2015.
    In this volume young researchers endeavour to build a new world. They neither confine themselves to criticism, resentment and disenchantment nor submit to traditional conceptions of truth, past moral imperatives and supra-sensitive ideals alone. Here, young researchers invent another way of thinking, believing, making art, or being political players. They can be seen as inaugurating an epoch when the cultivation of nature as an environment encompassing natural belonging allows for a world-wide c…Read more
  •  4
    Grafts: writings on plants
    Univocal. 2016.
    Grafting: do we ever do anything other than that? And are we ever free from vegetal influences when we engage in its operations? For the philosopher Michael Marder, our reflections on vegetal life have a fundamental importance in how we can reflect on our own conceptions of ethics, politics, and philosophy in general. Taking as his starting point the simple vegetal conception of grafting, Marder guides the reader through his concise and numerous reflections on what could be described as a vegeta…Read more
  •  3
    Heidegger: phenomenology, ecology, politics
    University of Minnesota Press. 2018.
    Understanding the political and ecological implications of Heidegger's work without ignoring his noxious public engagements The most controversial philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger has influenced generations of intellectuals even as his involvement with Nazism and blatant anti-Semitism, made even clearer after the publication of his Black Notebooks, have recently prompted some to discard his contributions entirely. For Michael Marder, Heidegger's thought remains critical for…Read more
  •  3
    Hegel's energy: a reading of The phenomenology of spirit
    Northwestern University Press. 2021.
    This book integrates Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit and contemporary conversations about energy. By interpreting actuality as energy in the Hegelian corpus, the author provides a new lens for understanding the dialectical project and the energy⁰́₁starved condition of our contemporaneity.
  • Auto-Heteronomy: Thoreau's Circuitous Return to the Vegetal World
    In Branka Arsic? & Vesna Kuiken (eds.), Dispersion: Thoreau and vegetal thought, Bloomsbury Academic. 2021.
  •  4
    Philosophy's Homecoming
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2016 (177): 169-185. 2016.
  •  2
    Hermeneutic Communism as (Weak) Political Phenomenology
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2017 (180): 205-211. 2017.
  •  18
    Vegetal entwinements in philosophy and art: a reader (edited book)
    with Giovanni Aloi
    The MIT Press. 2023.
    A reader of previously published and new material (interviews with artists and theorists) devoted to the new and growing field of critical plant studies, and a reader that practices what it covers by arranging and intertwining its contents through a non-hierarchical and articulated manner that allow for different, alternate reading pathways.
  •  8
    An innovative look at philosophies of nature across cultures and traditions through the common thread of burning nature down in order to be reborn over and over again.
  •  16
    Is a Philosophy of Nature Still Tenable?
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 29 21-32. 2022.
    This article contemplates the possibility of a philosophy of nature in and for the twenty-first century. Following an examination of the contemporary critiques of the concept of nature, I propose an alternative approach, inspired by Heraclitus and Friedrich Schelling, according to which nature is not an archaic category, but something yet to come, to be invented and reinvented. At the same time, I argue that the irreducible futurity of nature needs to be set in the context of the current global …Read more
  •  1
    The Antinomies of Refugee Reason
    Télos 2022 (198): 113-123. 2022.
  •  5
    The Ecological Literacies of St. Hildegard of Bingen
    Philosophies 6 (4): 98. 2021.
    Literacy is, literally, a question not of education but of the letter. More than that, it is the question of the letter in the two senses the word has in English: as a symbol of the alphabet and a piece of correspondence. It is my hypothesis that ecological literacies may learn a great deal from the literalization, or even the hyper-literalization, of the letter and that they may do so by turning to the corpus of twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, polymath, and mystic St. Hildegard of Bingen. A…Read more
  •  13
    The Weirdness of Being in Time: Aristotle, Hegel, and Plants
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 54 (4): 333-347. 2021.
    ABSTRACT In this short text, I analyze various senses of being in time. My claim is that time forms a weird interiority through an embrace of whatever is “in” it. I, then, flesh out this claim through a close reading of Book IV in Aristotle's Physics, while grafting each “measure of movement,” through which the Greek philosopher defines time, onto the movements of plants. The result is a twisting and turning, ramified, wayward temporality that holds every sense of being in time in a vegetal embr…Read more
  •  6
    6 Ecology as Event
    In Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes & David Wood (eds.), Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, Fordham University Press. pp. 141-164. 2018.
  •  21
    Betrayal: A Philosophy
    Research in Phenomenology 50 (1): 79-98. 2020.
    This essay imagines the shape a phenomenology of betrayal would assume at the limits of phenomenology. With Caravaggio’s 1602 painting Cattura di Cristo for an aesthetic backdrop, I consider the paradoxical structure of betrayal with its interwoven strands of a surplus disclosure and a breach of trust. I go on to elaborate the relation of this complex term, at once positive and negative, to time, conceptuality, and truth. Ultimately, I am interested in how betrayal as a limit of phenomenology, w…Read more
  •  2
    Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2020.
    This new edition includes recent examples of the uses and accusations of ‘incendiary speech’ both by Donald Trump and by European populist right and exploration of threats of global warming that have now reached a turning point in our collective relation to the dangers and promises of fire.
  •  9
    The Place of Plants: Spatiality, Movement, Growth
    Performance Philosophy 1 (1): 185-194. 2015.
    Considering the ways in which plants move and shape the places of their growth, this article suggests that performing arts should account for the vegetal model of movement. The implications of including plants in the category of “moving beings” are vast, as they touch upon the dynamic relation between immanence and transcendence, questions of time-scales appropriate to different kinds of beings and their responses to the environment, and phenomenologies of place corresponding to diverse forms of…Read more
  •  29
    What Needs to Change in Our Thinking about Climate Change
    Environmental Philosophy 17 (1): 9-17. 2020.
    In this article I argue that, the consciousness of climate change will remain wanting, unless it reaches all the way to the level of self-consciousness. Interrelating the meanings of “climate” and “thinking,” I suggest that only an approach that shuns subjective mastery and distance will be adequate to this peculiar non-object.
  •  17
    On the Vegetal Verge
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 11 (2): 137-146. 2019.
    ABSTRACTThis article is a meditation, developed in dialogue with the thought of twelfth-century German mystic and saint Hildegard of Bingen, on the various senses of the verge. Besides connoting a temporal and spatial edge, the verge unites such apparently disparate things as virginity and virility, vigor and virtue, veracity and viriditas – Hildegard’s original term for the vegetal principle of “greening green,” allowing for the self-reproduction of all finite existence. I show how, in the shad…Read more
  •  27
    Anti-Nomad
    Deleuze and Guatarri Studies 10 (4): 496-503. 2016.
    This brief text offers a critique of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of nomadism. It is shown that ‘nomadism’ functions as a compilation of unresolved contradictions, such as those of movement and rest, anarchy and order, numeric abstraction and concrete placement. I argue that, in the last instance, this concept bears allegiance to its etymological provenance from the Greek nomos and that it veers on the side of an economy, rather than an ecology, of being.
  •  7