Through Vegetal Being

Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. Irigaray and Marder consider how the vegetal world contributes to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies alive. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal world.

A unique collaboration to map the ontology and epistemology of the human-plant relationship.

Luce Irigaray is director of research in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She is the author of more than thirty books, the most recent of which are Sharing the World and In the Beginning, She Was.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Among his books are Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life and The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium.

Claudia Baracchi, University of Milano-Bicocca:
Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder surprise us with a moving foray into life in its barest, elemental traits. By tapping into the pulse and silent language shared by all animate beings, they unsettle received philosophical narratives and awaken modes of sensibility both subtle and expanded. The contact with the mystery of vegetal life renews the investigation into human becoming, its potentiality and cultivation.

Daniel Innerarity, author of Governance in the New Global Disorder:
Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder have written an admirable and singular book, where they recover two aspects of philosophy that have been otherwise forgotten. On the one hand, they return to a reflection on our condition as living beings, the context in which and thanks to which we exist. On the other hand, their method is an epistolary dialogue, a genre that has given us some of the most profound and least abstract insights along the history of philosophy.

William Egginton, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University:
Through Vegetal Being explores what the vegetal realm can offer to philosophy and the tradition of western metaphysics. The two voices in dialogue—legendary feminist thinker Luce Irigaray and acclaimed philosopher Michael Marder—engage the critique of metaphysics from a perspective that is largely without precedent, thus cross pollinating between such intellectual fields as continental philosophy, environmentalism, gardening, and botany.

Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor at Duke University:
Through Vegetal Being foregrounds the relations that plants enable between humans and other living things, continuing both Michael Marder's work on plant existence and Luce Irigaray's work on sexual difference and the forgetting of the world in the constitution of individual identity. This charming and beautifully written book is a two-person meditation on the philosophy, ontology, and ethics of plant life and our fundamental dependence on it as living beings.