Powell’s Q&A: Michael Marder
Posted by Michael Marder, May 20, 2013 10:00 am
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Describe your latest work.
When I started working on Plant-Thinking in 2008, I had no idea that the project would turn out to be as broad as it did. In fact, a philosophy of plant life is a multivolume undertaking. Besides Plant-Thinking, it will include a book titled The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium, slated for publication by Columbia University Press next year; a text on the ethics and politics of vegetal life, under the title Plant-Doing; and an attempt at imagining a phenomenology of and for plants, titled Phyto-phenomenology.
For the next book, I have been collaborating with a fantastic French artist, Mathilde Roussel. Mathilde is beautifully illustrating the "intellectual herbarium," which consists of chapters ranging from "Plato's Plane Tree" and "Augustine's Pears" to "Kant's Tulip" and "Heidegger's Apple Tree." The idea is to introduce the thinking of some key figures in Western philosophy through the prism of a particular plant they either mentioned in passing or focused on in their writings. Leafing through the pages of the intellectual herbarium, readers will learn about the theories of these thinkers, as well as their take on plant life. This ...
