“[…] humans are themselves no longer the subject of the landscape, but are rather subjected to and dispersed by that beyond. We are, as Jane Bennett suggests, constituted in an assemblage of vibrant materialities.”
Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism (2019)
The following text is an exchange with Michael Marder, who I met at FAR – Fondazione Antonio Ratti, during an event that was part of their Cinema Permanente project. Philosopher and Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, he already wrote for LFU here, he’s published many books and articles, among which: Pyropolitics: Fire and the Political (2015) and Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016) with Luce Irigaray. Forthcoming in 2026 he has Of Joints and Other Articulations: The Futures of Arthrosophy.
EM: Reading both yours and Irigaray’s pages in Through Vegetal Being, it looks like the proposal for ecology, for critical thought – and perhaps art? – is rootedness, the visceral feeling of being- and becoming-with, rediscovering the umbilical cord with a world that we “have never really left” (we have never been modern!), even if we have to breathe for ourselves.
Learning from plants, listening to their silence, we see that their rootedness is what makes them so different from us; yes, they stay in one place, but they make a place, in your words: they world, in the verbal, active sense. It made me think of that novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.
MM: I agree that rootedness is an important notion in the book, but it is immediately presented (in my first letter or chapter, and differently in Luce’s) in terms that do not coincide with those of today’s parochial nationalisms and right-wing ideologies. In fact, the figure of the roots is prevalent in the contemporary revival of the far right and its rejection of the foreigner, the other, the uprooted or the rootless. (I observe here in passing that traditionally, in Europe, Jewish and Roma people have been denigrated and discriminated against, precisely on account of their apparent rootlessness.) Human roots are different to those of plants: one can be rooted in a tradition, rather than in a certain place, and, therefore, in time; one is definitely rooted in the relation to the other, be it a human other or not; as you note, roots are made, grown toward or away from something or someone… Finally, if we insist on the placing of human roots, then this place must be planetary: it makes sense to me to speak, spatially, of the planetary rootedness of humankind that contribute to the emergence of our vegetal planetary consciousness, well in excess of the nationalist-exclusionary logics of roots.
EM: Of course. This is why we need to learn to lose ourselves, to let ourselves and our identities fall apart and combine with others. Another major point of your shared effort is the concept of the void, the necessary space between one and the other living being, the space where the air of our breathing lives and is exchanged, the space that allows us to grow and to move, which we must always take into account. Luce Irigaray writes that taking on this void in relating to others (which therefore requires respect for otherness) presupposes an aptitude for thinking. This is important; learning to think means learning that we are fundamentally open.
MM: Yes, the void is not something purely negative; it is the break, the punctuation and discontinuity that makes a relation what it is. More recently, I have been thinking of the logics of articulation (and logic, logos, itself is but one possible articulation of articulation) from the perspective of dis-articulation, the gap (for instance in our mobile joints and the synovial cavities they entail) that enable movement but also renders us incredibly fragile. Fundamental openness is indispensable to existence itself, even if it is imbued with extreme danger and vulnerability. I propose not only to acknowledge the irreducibility of the void, but also to begin with it, to overview the nodes it interrelates from the perspective of its groundlessness. This proposal is concretized in my forthcoming book Of Joints and Other Articulations: The Futures of Arthrosophy (2026). And thinking, of course, inherits the same sort of mobility and fragility, vulnerability and agility from the more embodied void that makes it possible.
Robert Zemeckis, Here, 2024 – Mel Chin, Revival field, 1989 – ongoing
EM: This concept of void, together with your considerations on Plato’s khôra which — far from being a site or a landscape — has agency and is tied to the notion of matter (hyle, wood), made me think of the physics’ concept of field (that was already present in Leibniz’s work), that similarly interacts, while also being the there where the interactions take place. If plants make a place, learning from them we must start asking where we find ourselves — which is not the same as asking what our place is and identifying with it. A landscape (makes me think of art history) or a site (we can think of science) is usually a flat(tened) something we can nail objects — and even ourselves — to, making this something invisible, tying it to the background. A place is none of that.
As I told you, I was reading Amanda Boetzkes Plastic Capitalism, and I believe much of her work in that book resonates with our themes here. To avoid what she calls an “ideological form of ecology”, disingenuously tied to morality (and we can hear the echoes of Nietzsche’s Genealogy), we need ways to “visualize the wastescape” that would urge us to respond, to act. What’s at stake is that art should make the invisible visible, but the problem is our ability to see, to read the signs (and Merleau-Ponty said that nature, too, is made of signs). Boetzkes asks: What does this incapacity [to read our waste] tell us about the state of criticism? Or the relationship between techniques of visualization and criticality?
MM: Here I must refer to my 2020 monograph Dump Philosophy and its subsequent reverberations in my writings. I agree that we must avoid the “ideological form of ecology” and the work of moralizing that turns philosophy into a rather annoying sermon. But it seems to me that the difficulties (in Boetzkes’ more extreme terms, the “incapacity”) to “visualize the wastescape” go further still than the sad state of contemporary criticism. For me, what is missing is the ontological scope of such a gaze, an ontology that is ambiguously metaphysical and non-metaphysical. To put it succinctly, the dump (which is made of non-decomposable physical “waste” and massive emissions, as much as of huge quantities of information, light and sound and taste pollution, shreds of theological ideas, and so forth) is the name for being itself in the 21st century. As such, it is a perverse inheritor of all the old metaphysical concepts, starting with Plato’s Ideas, which it clothes with flesh in the world, clogging ecosystems and organisms. So, I would say that we need an ontological reading of the signs, an onto-interpretation of the dump that is supplanting our worlds, both outer and inner, and that is destroying much else, including the very (permeable, to be sure) boundaries between different regions of being.
EM: I enjoy this notion of ambiguity; it’s not only about rootedness but also about losing oneself, not only a question of feeling, sensitivity, but one of intellectual plasticity, a “good kind” of criticism that is not allergic to the complexities of life, to quote one of the last chapters in Through Vegetal Being. In spite of Plato, we always need to remember that thinking is inseparable from our living bodies, from our feeling pain (Lyotard), pleasure, etc. and also that ‘our’ thinking is never ours.
And of course, if thinking is impossible without the body, without the senses, then also nothing is separated from the sensuous surfaces of the world. Our senses can also gift us the ability to hear the rhythms of life; sensibility is what makes us feel that the rhythm of the seasons is not pointless repetition, that the rhythm of our breathing is what delivers us to others, since air repeatedly crosses the boundaries of inside (what is supposed to be ‘ours’) and outside (the Other). My point is, do you think this is the same kind of sensitivity that moves us when we listen to Mahler’s symphonies or that touches us when we witness Zemeckis’ camera graciously move at the end of Here (2024)?
MM: It is not the same kind of sensitivity, but the two kinds (if that’s what they are) are closely related. According to me, art is an articulation: it articulates the articulations of the world and also the nothing, the void, breathing at the heart of each articulation. I do not mean to reduce all art to an onomatopoeic, or, more broadly, mimetic endeavor. Rather, the world is already a complex articulation; it is already an art, while what we call art lets it reach us and touch us otherwise. Because the world, in its ecological aspect and not only, gives itself to us in a sort of plenitude, always in excess of our capacity to receive it, music or dance or painting puts this givenness in more or less manageable limits. How else can we be privy to movement itself, to sound itself—but always in the shape of movements, sounds: in sequences, in times, in the rhythms or rhythmicalities they harbor in themselves—if not thanks to the mediations of art, its rearticulations of articulation? And, of course, it is all the more difficult to get in touch with the constitutive void, which is what art tends to accomplish in an almost infinite variety of forms.
EM: To build on that, can linking the two faces of sensitivity mean that we can finally make the categories of nature and culture obsolete? Precisely because nature is already an art, and I’m thinking of Caillois’ L’écriture des pierres, the crabs’ dances that exceed and defy the neo-Darwinian ideas of evolution, and all the creative ways other-than-human beings communicate and play. Humans and nature and art are all made of movement, as well as rhythms, and this is why the distinction doesn’t hold. This division can be as suffocating as any other, because it doesn’t bring an opening, it doesn’t make room. Can, then, aesthetic sensibility deepen our ability to be with other living beings and vice versa, but also our response-ability, the ability to act? In this regard perhaps it’s also good to highlight the use of the English words “move” and “touch” – and the Italian “commuovere” which also literally means to move with.
MM: As you can see, the two faces of sensitivity are intimately linked for me. That said, I am reluctant to give up on the word nature, more so than culture. I think that what we call nature is still largely misunderstood, that this ancient word still has a robust future. First of all, in the banal sense that even if “we”—progressive, intellectual, generally leftist people—bury the word, it will keep living on in right-wing and extreme right political discourses and thought. I for one am not willing to cede nature to the right. In The Phoenix Complex (2023) and in a still unpublished book Fabrication: Of Intelligence and Nature, I insist that it is an indispensable concept, particularly when taken in its active, verbal scope of growing (in ancient Greek phusis/phuein) and of birthing (in Latin natura/nascere). In a sense, growing and birthing are the blind spots and the starting points of the ability to act and of responsibility: of giving room or taking space, of reigniting life and/or condemning it to ongoing suffering. Birthing and growing are impossible without a relation to the other; they are necessarily an acting-with. But the forms of this relation vary wildly, depending on the political and at times economic coordinates. For instance, what is the sense of growth, if not a quantitative increase in the same, in the age of capitalism? And what is the meaning of birth, given the restriction of the question from whom is one born? to a mother, or, at best, a pair of one’s human progenitors?
EM: I get why you are reluctant to give up on nature (the word), and I share the sentiment; it looks like it could be linked to our not giving up on nature itself — however wide the meaning of this statement. If, pragmatically, meaning is what we’re prepared to do, is the way we respond, we need to act with nature and use nature responsibly, taking into account those vital blind spots (this is what should make the distinction between right-wing and leftist praxis). Starting “from below”, from our day-to-day, our immediate proximities, with the creation of spaces of growth that are critical (?) enough that they escape capitalistic profit and progress logics, and with widening our understanding of birth and birthing, consequently of families and kinship, with very practical struggles as well as theoretical ones. Many would argue, and this is what I was trying to suggest, that the making of art (and its “fruition”) is the way to go down this route, or at least one of the ways. To frequent art – especially explicitly political art, but then again all art is political – is to me what can make a difference, even in our day-to-day, in our relationships, very similarly to what happens frequenting vegetal life… W.J.T. Mitchell has already made an interesting proposition on Art X Environment — a relationship that is not a mere addition, where the result is different from the sum of the parts.
As you argue in the book, we must pay attention to our senses in a non-traumatic way, one that is not driven by fear; I believe that this has to be one of the big themes of ecology, and critical thought in general. Many feminist theorists have already pointed out that we perceive being born as being separated and independent, and perceive the “falling into a body” as a traumatic and regretful event, that we must strive to counteract (through ideas, through the life of the soul after death – these are eminently classic motifs). Adriana Cavarero maintains that man’s fear of death is one of the primary fuels of the Ancient Greeks’ thirst for glory but also of the entirety of metaphysical thought – and of course we know of the relationship between Enlightened philosophers and fear. Is this why post-deconstruction cannot only be theoretical, why we need to be stepping outside and to be physically meeting with the radically different – like plants?
Robert Smithson, Blind in the Valley of the Suicides, 1962 – Ed Ruscha, Tiny Subjects, 2009
MM: I would go so far as to extend your line of thinking and questioning to ecology itself. It is not by chance that “the ecological turn” (among the many contemporary “turns” that make one’s head spin) has unfolded under the sign of trauma. Ecology becomes synonymous with the apocalypse: when the world becomes nearly unlivable, the air unbreathable, and so on, we all of a sudden rush to think them, to commemorate (and so, to preserve) them at least in thought. Too late, always too late—as Hegel (and especially the Owl of Minerva) would intone. There is also the exact opposite approach of idealizing ecology, considering it (and the other-than-human realm in general) as one of purity and exemplarity. This approach willfully blinds itself to the all-permeating effects of the ontological dump, from which there is no escaping. In dealing with the plants from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or with those growing in Terra dei Fuochi just outside Napoli, I seek to skirt both of these extremes. So, yes, post-deconstruction cannot be only theoretical, because then it would participate in the idealization of the other, but it also cannot be only a one-time effort, because the forces of cultural and metaphysical repression (I mean this with the Freudian flair of the term) cannot be dispelled once and for all.
EM: Can we also talk about a vegetal pedagogy then, the theme of your talk at FAR, that introduced Uriel Orlow’s We Have Already Lived Through Our Future – We Just Don’t Remember It (2024)?
MM: Vegetal pedagogy means that even at the concentrated sites of actual dumps—I would say, especially at those sites—plants can teach us a great deal about resistance and survival, for sure, and above all about the very meaning of being (which is a dump), to put it in Heideggerianese. More broadly, vegetal pedagogy is my way of taking a deep breath (here it is, breath, again) and turning to plants in a desire to learn, or to re-learn, the ways of thinking and being in the world. One such experiment is learning to think from a germinating seed, while patiently following its energetic rest prior to germination and (with the help of close observation, philosophy, plant science, literature, theology, music, and visual art) its gradual root and shoot polarization and subsequent growth. If you will, learning from plants (seeds included) is learning from the middle and from the void: not starting with a pre-given binary to be deconstructed, but, instead, starting in that middle and seeing how what appears to be a binary is its extension. In a sense, my work on joints and, prior to that, on the figure of the passenger, is a part of this effort.
EM: Speaking of what needs to be done, I was excited about the idea of the ethics of the process, of the pure means (it always goes back to Nietzsche, doesn’t it); you posit that it would be more in tune with life itself and its vibrancy — to quote Jane Bennett — since the ends are by definition “blockages of energy”, but what does this ethics look like? Can you elaborate further?
MM: I would say that this is an ethics of the middle—the pure means, the process, or what have you are all variations on the middle—which is all there is despite and within the finitude of our existence. This would be an ethics on the hither side of the Kantian distinction between instrumentalization and respect, the means and the ends. In fact, as an ethics, an ethos, it has little to do with the precepts of morality (and in this, really, I am close to Nietzsche), because it is not prescriptive but of a piece with life. If we conceive the environment as a milieu, then being the middle is not like a central point in the circle of the milieu, but being the milieu ourselves—for others, be they the microorganisms that live in or on us or for the people and plants and all the other beings we interact with. So, what does the middle do? It middles. It channels and mediates; it lets flow, while also gently conducting the flow in certain directions. Sometimes it seems to me that this line of thinking and doing is at the antipodes of Leibniz’s monads, even though his Baroque notion of matter comes very close to what I have in mind. For Leibniz, matter is a garden within a garden within a garden… all the way down to the micro- (and now we would add nano-) level. I would add that we should relate not only to matter but also to ourselves and to others as a middle in a middle in a middle…
Elisa Mancioli
Michael Marder