Thoreau’s Garden Politics (re-edition)
This essay responds to the emergence of the plant as a new subject in contemporary theory. It focuses on two recent books that put vegetable life at the center of their analyses in an effort to reassess the political landscape of Western modernity from the ground up. Yet in the face of increasingly...
Guardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/miranda, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Miranda
2023
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| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | This essay responds to the emergence of the plant as a new subject in contemporary theory. It focuses on two recent books that put vegetable life at the center of their analyses in an effort to reassess the political landscape of Western modernity from the ground up. Yet in the face of increasingly urgent climate disasters, these books seem oddly demobilizing in their injunction to cultivate a more contemplative, less decisive disposition. To make sense of this paradox, I look to Henry David Thoreau’s botanical ruminations in Walden. Notwithstanding plant theory’s claim that 19th century Western thought entirely disregarded the importance of plant life, Thoreau explicitly troubles the assumption that one has the “right” to kill and use certain plants for one’s benefit. Not unlike our plant theorists, he invites his readers to adopt a “much slower” pace so they may gain a “more intimate” knowledge of the living economy in which they partake. But Thoreau goes beyond elaborating a speculative ethics modeled after the way plants live. What he models, rather, is a pragmatic politics of planting that confronts head-on the thorny issues of death and violence and, as such, delineates the contours of a biopolitics capable of accounting for vegetal life. |
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