Jeffrey T. Nealon

Plant Theory

Biopower and Vegetable Life

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book joins the growing philosophical literature on vegetable life to ask what changes in our present humanities debates about biopower and Animal Studies if we take plants as a linchpin for thinking about biopolitics.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 168
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Oktober 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 153mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 264g
• ISBN-13: 9780804796750
• ISBN-10: 0804796750
• Artikelnr.: 42786809

Autorenporträt

Jeffrey T. Nealon is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
0Preface: Plant Theory?
chapter abstract
The Preface discusses biopolitical discourse's strange elision of vegetable
life (especially within Animal Studies), and suggests that if we really do
want to take the discussion of life and power beyond the human, we might
want to look at vegetable life as well. Likewise, the preface argues that
Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze & Guattari are privileged sites for thinking
about vegetable life.
1The First Birth of Biopower: From Plant to Animal Life in Foucault
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 looks at the "first birth of biopower" in Michel Foucault's 1966
The Order of Things. There Foucault suggests, contra Animal Studies, that
it is not the animal who is the "other" of the biopolitical human, but the
plant. In the turn to "life" as a kind of obsessive topic in the humanities
in the early 19th century, the animal took over from the plant as the
primary marker for what all life is, and how human life works (as infinite
"animal" desire). This Chapter then goes on to examine critically Giorgio
Agamben's work on Foucault.
2Thinking Plants, with Aristotle and Heidegger
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 examines the philosophical background for the turn to "life" in
contemporary theory, focusing its reading especially on Aristotle's De
Anima and Heidegger's The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,
Finitude, Solitude. The chapter looks closely at what these foundational
thinkers have to say about vegetable life, and how it relates to their
thinking on human and animal life.
3Animal and Plant, Life and World in Derrida; or, The Plant and the
Sovereign
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 takes up Derrida's work on animality, and focuses on his strange
elision of plant life within his extensive interrogation of animal life.
Several times Derrida brings up the status of vegetable life within the
discourse of animality, but each and every time he simply passes over
offering a sustained analysis of plant life. By backtracking from his work
on animality to his 1974 Glas, this chapter tries to suture that gap in
Derrida's work. This chapter concludes by arguing that Derrida's work on
emergence (physis, Walten) is the key to thinking about vegetable life in
his work, and offers a challenge to the charge of "correlationism" leveled
against deconstruction.
4From the World to the Territory: Vegetable Life in Deleuze and Guattari;
or, What is a Rhizome?
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 highlights Deleuze and Guattari's attempts, following Simondon,
to think "life" outside the individual organism, thereby offering us a more
robust and distributed notion of life (and death) as a kind of mesh or
swarm of forms of life, rather than an individual organism striving to
maintain its life at all costs. Going forward, I suggest this may be the
only way to think about "life" in a world facing ecological disaster.
5What Difference Does It Make?
chapter abstract
The Coda suggests the myriad ways that taking vegetable life seriously as a
form of life would change current debates about the fate of the human.
Plants are of course the basis of the food chain on land and in the sea,
and if one is concerned about the neoliberal corporate patenting of life,
this chapter suggests that one look closely at the plant kingdom, where
it's already happened.