“joint project by Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder”
“The book could be described as a nostalgic undertaking, one which conceives of nature, and in particular vegetal being, as a home, a realm prior to culture, language, and social relations, to which we can retreat or appeal in response to inauthentic forms of being-in-the-world.”
“Marder places his writing on plant thinking in the context of the “weak thinking” described by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabal as the rejection of the pursuit of any developed philosophical system in order to avoid the violence of systematicity, embracing only the weak right to “interpret, vote and live” and seek “ontological emancipation from truth and other concepts that frame and restrict the possibilities of new philosophical, scientific, or religious revolutions.””
“Both Irigaray and Marder write about a relationship that involves the vegetal world, but whereas for Irigaray vegetal being, for the most part, provides a space of refuge from, renewal of, and transformation of human experience, for Marder the relationship is one we have with plants directly.”
“Much of the first part of the book recounts her anger and hurt at being dismissed from her teaching position at the University of Paris and expelled from the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis subsequent to the publication of her revolutionary work Speculum: of the Other Woman. The distress of these life events pushed her to a realization, she writes, that the intellectual and cultural tradition into which she was born neglects life.”
“The theme of life is one of the most prevalent in the book. A strong theme in Irigaray’s work Between East and West, life here takes on a less reciprocal significance than in her earlier figures of two lips, the mother-daughter relation, and the placenta.”
“Here she decidedly counterpoises life, which “escapes representation” (16) and can “hardly be communicated” (7), to “cultural construction” (12), whereas in her earlier works, such as Je, Tu, Nous and This Sex Which is Not One, the placenta aided the mother and child in forming an “almost ethical” relation (41), and the two lips formed an alternate figure to the monolithic phallus in service of a new universal or a feminine subjectivity.”
“Here, vegetal being, while personified as a mother, surrounds the adult Luce with an immediate, literally self-less care, forming a kind of “aerial placenta” that purifies her breath “without asking for anything in return” (21).”
“That “there is air,” she writes, is enough; she does not need any “other” at this point (22). In a brief analysis, Irigaray describes life as a time before human intersubjectivity, before “the institutional conflict in which Creon opposed Antigone” (19). This fantasized “life itself” prior to human techne evoked in contact with vegetal nature is a time before historical time. Cut off from its natural source, she writes, the earth has fallen prey to man’s fabrication (33), and thus to nihilistic forces.”
“Irigaray repeatedly invokes Nietzsche’s search for a feminine companion, leading one to possibly draw the conclusion that this book is a kind of Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche reinterpreted through plant life.”
“Chapters eight and nine are full of allusions to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, including a discussion of incarnation (“Zarathustra wants to become human again,”) a move back among people and a search for companions (“living companions I need”), a critique of the forgetting of natural existence (“remain faithful to the earth”), and finally a call against moralism and for the revaluation of all values.”
“She turns to Shiva as a figure of, in her words, a “new Zarathustra” who can assure a transition between West and East, one who also needs a suitable feminine companion to “awaken his masculine energy” (73).”
“Shiva, she writes, chose the forest rather than the mountains and ice that were Zarathustra’s preference; in a like manner, she opts for the refuge of vegetal being over the sterility of the logos. Surprisingly, Irigaray appears unaware of how fundamentally her work has contributed to the undoing and refiguration of the latter.”
“Like Irigaray, Marder found a refuge in vegetal being, but his account attests to a strong desire not only to escape to nature but also to forge an intimate relationship with it.”
“He argues that the plant/vegetal world should not primarily be thought of as something for humans, a stance that would render it part of the human tradition that seeks to master and domesticate nature for its own use, but rather as itself autonomous.”
“Marder, too, suggests that an authentic encounter with the multiple life forms represented by plants (but not excluding animals and humans), is life affirming in a way that can combat nihilism.”
“Vegetal being again stands in for life, although Marder is careful to insist that there can be no metaphysical singular universal “Life”.”
“Marder posits that vegetal life is at the origin of all living, and that the phenomenon of plant germination may be behind both natural and cultural happening. If this is true, he suggests, then our relationship to our own birth, rather than a traumatic break with what or who gave us life, as psychoanalysis and philosophy would have it, could be reconceptualized as “a continuous appearing, forever indebted before and relying on its ‘soil’” (170). The other to whom we are indebted would be vegetal being.”
“Marder’s suggestion that being with plants and animals is a togetherness that precedes sociality is philosophically undeveloped, but poetically forms part of a lovely passage on walking through the woods and catching sight of a figure that may or may not be a human being ahead. In a kind of intersubjective version of Descartes’ doubt that his body is his own, the ambiguity of the situation in the woods leads Marder to imagine that what he sees obscurely ahead of him may be not a person at all but a robot; it is foggy and he cannot discern it clearly. Yet, he asks, why would a robot stroll in the woods? (180) To go into the woods alone and to encounter an other in the woods are the activities of a living being, not a robot.”
“This observation strikes the reader as true; however, in continuing, Marder asks: “could it be that we are least robotlike when we encounter the natural world and meet other humans there?” (183) It is in the occasional somewhat clunky critique of technologized life and the implication that nature is an untouched sphere to be judged against the “robotlike” that Marder and Irigaray draw closest to each other.”
“Specifying nature as the antithesis of and a respite from instrumental reason, Adorno noted, immediately and paradoxically co-opts it to the sphere of what it intends to oppose, in the form of the leisure industry, the aesthetic appreciation of nature, and the care of nature as a care of the self, just as vegetable energy is coopted into animal consumption. Marder’s discomfort with some of Irigaray’s language of nature as a refuge from the logos, I think, reflects its tendency to identify nature only in its relation to the human.”