Assembly with Michael Marder, facilitated by Dmitry Vilensky. The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration We have a situation here holds this online meeting on Saturday December 5th at 19:00 CET. Join us on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82527087936 Meeting ID: 825 2708 7936 – Streaming online on IRI YouTube Channel.
Recently art world has started to welcome many types of artistic works which deals with broad issues of vegetation. We observe them in forms of installations which includes real plants, the films which document different ways of alternative agricultural developments or speak about ecoversity and we could remember many other examples of the artistic approaches and care for the new forms of previously ignored subjectivation.
Looks like that these processes are interconnected with general political turn which could be explained as a move from nomadic relationship to a sedentary one. And this situation is definitely accelerated with the current pandemic.
This issues we will discuss with Michael Marder
The vegetalization of body politic is well under way, but we lack the language for articulating such a momentous development in the lives of our societies. Our imagination of the political realm still relies on figures and tropes derived from the animal world, positing body politic as a healthy or sick organism with one or two vital centers of power and a totality of members subordinated to centralized authorities. I suggest that, in order to start thinking through the vegetalization of politics, it is crucial to consider the process of becoming-plant in general and to view this process as fundamental to any sort of becoming. Thus, two objectives will animate our encounter: appreciating the ground rules for becoming-plant and transposing them onto body politic. (M.M.)
Suggested Materials
Marder, Michael, “Resist like a plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements”, Peace Studies Journal, Vol. 5, Issue 1, January 2002. p. 25. quoted from http://peacestudiesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PSJ-Vol-5-Issue-1-2012.pdf
https://www.michaelmarder.org/articles/list-of-articles/
BIO
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of phenomenology, political thought, and environmental philosophy. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and fifteen monographs, including Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013); Phenomena—Critique—Logos: The Project of Critical Phenomenology (2014); The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014); Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams: Of Actuality (2017), Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics (2018), Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts (2019), and Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation (2020) among others. For more information michaelmarder.org