Plant-thinking : a philosophy of vegetal life /

Marder (philosophy, Univ. of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) attempts to ground an environmental ethic of respect for plant life, showing how people can properly "encounter plants." The author rejects the conception of the value of living nature as deriving from practical human needs, even in the case of plants. He goes beyond appreciation of the aesthetic value of the beauty of plants, proposing that a kind of "plant-thinking" could tap the roots of human thought lying beneath human language and cognition. The work is indeed profoundly original, even if the often convoluted rhetoric may strike some readers as a bit over the top. For example, Marder counsels readers: "to eat ethically, eat like a plant!" and "without endeavoring to swallow up its very otherness in one's corporeal and psychic interiority." The work is nevertheless more insightful than it might seem to those unaccustomed to postmodern rhetoric. Marder finds rapport with a host of reflections on plant life by philosophers from Plato to Derrida. The book also recognizes the increasing appreciation of the remarkable complexity of plant behavior revealed in recent botanical research. Plant-Thinking is valuable to those who can groove to its deconstruction style of thinking. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers/faculty. H. C. Byerly emeritus, University of Arizona

Marder (The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism), a professor of philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, offers an ambitious and opaque meditation on the philosophical significance of plant life. Best left to professional philosophers and likely inaccessible for lay readers, the affirmation of "plants' potential to resist the logic of totalization" is frequently more an excuse to cover the author's knowledge of Heidegger or Nietzsche, among others, than a polemical guide to the practice of plant thinking. Still, in its relentless dissection, the work breeds its own kind of rhythm, lulling the reader into a parallel world of "'plant soul'" and "plant time," in which the natural and artificial blend. Ultimately, this microlens on plant being is a refraction of the human existence and experience of the world, made clearer by what it is not. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.