Presents:
Vegetality, or Tarrying with Germinating Seeds
with
Professor Michael Marder
Marder will be reading from his forthcoming book: Vegetality, or Tarrying with Germinating Seeds, 2025 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Humanities Gateway 1030
How to re-learn the work and the play of thinking from plants? I propose shifting the focus and perspectives of our thought and attention from the extremes to the middle, whence the extremes emerge and develop in their tireless interplay. Rather than commence with the earth and the sky-that is, with the elemental and metaphysical terrestrial and celestial grounds of vegetal life arranged in definite hierarchical formations-starting in the middle that is the seed is following the seed's own trajectories, whether of germination or non-germination. My wager is that it will be possible to glean surprising implications from such an exercise for the practice of human thinking, which would be of a piece with and conducive to life.
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec), Berlin. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenom enology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013), The Philosopher's Plant (2014), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020, 2025), Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel's Energy (2021), Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (2024). More information at michaelmarder.org.