Michael Marder - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael Marder

Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2019

This article is a meditation, developed in dialogue with the thought of twelfth-century German my... more This article is a meditation, developed in dialogue with the thought of twelfth-century German mystic and saint Hildegard of Bingen, on the various senses of the verge. Besides connoting a temporal and spatial edge, the verge unites such apparently disparate things as virginity and virility, vigor and virtue, veracity and viriditas-Hildegard's original term for the vegetal principle of "greening green," allowing for the self-reproduction of all finite existence. I show how, in the shadow of vegetality, the verge sparks a series of sudden reversals in which, figured as "the greenest branch," Virgin Mary is imbued with a greater strength than the Flower-Child she carries, and plant life is endowed with vigor animating the rest of creation.

Vertimus

Anthropologie et Sociétés, 2021

En trois préambules et dix thèses, je considère la signification de « devenir-plante » en approfo... more En trois préambules et dix thèses, je considère la signification de « devenir-plante » en approfondissant le sens du devenir, de la végétalité et de leur imbrication mutuelle. Ces réflexions tournent, par ailleurs, autour de la figure de rotation dénotée dans le verbe latin vertere, même si elles remontent à la pensée grecque antique du devenir selon les voies parallèles de la métamorphose et du métabolisme, un changement de forme spatial et un changement temporel de trajectoire. La leçon pratique et philosophique de ces thèses est qu’il n’y a pas de devenir sans l’arrondi — sinon la circularité — du tournement ; qu’il ne s’agit pas d’une ligne directe d’ici à là, mais d’une route faite de détours et de va-et-vient (de l’être et du néant, de la progression ou de la digression dans une série et dans une boucle…) ; et que se tourner en (ou avec les) plantes est se tourner en (ou avec le) tournement, en osant devenir le devenir lui-même.

Ecology as Event

<p>This chapter argues that "ecology" could be read as one of the names for the e... more <p>This chapter argues that "ecology" could be read as one of the names for the evental break in the circuits of economic machinery that recover the subject on the way back to itself. That ecology would be perceived as a disruption (or the irruption) of the event is fitting to the epoch of a profound environmental crisis, rooted in the forgetting of what it means to dwell or to abide, to be at home without imposing an ideal mold on it. If this essentially eco-nomic mode of actively organizing a dwelling and being "chez-soi" has now become hegemonic, then the eco-logical ordering by the dwelling assumes the form of an originary trauma, positively instantiated in the gift.</p>

What Needs to Change in Our Thinking about Climate Change (and about Thinking) in advance

Environmental Philosophy, 2020

In this article I argue that, the consciousness of climate change will remain wanting, unless it ... more In this article I argue that, the consciousness of climate change will remain wanting, unless it reaches all the way to the level of self-consciousness. Interrelating the meanings of “climate” and “thinking,” I suggest that only an approach that shuns subjective mastery and distance will be adequate to this peculiar non-object.

Political Theology, 2015

In this article I argue that the ideal of rationality espoused by the European Enlightenment hing... more In this article I argue that the ideal of rationality espoused by the European Enlightenment hinges on the separation of the light of reason from heat, with which it had been conjoined in the classical element of fire at least since the Greek antiquity. As a result, evil, from the standpoint of the Enlightenment is tantamount to heat without light, while evil, critically viewed outside this tradition, inheres in the absolute separation between the two aspects of the life-giving, albeit ineluctably dangerous, fire.

Aristotle’s Wheat

The Philosopher's Plant, 2012

Existential Phenomenology According to Clarice Lispector

Philosophy and Literature, 2013

Clarice Lispector’s narrative in The Passion According to G.H. is a literary enactment of phenome... more Clarice Lispector’s narrative in The Passion According to G.H. is a literary enactment of phenomenology at the limit, an attempt at reimagining the world from nonadult and other-than-human points of view. I interpret the term “passion,” woven into Lispector’s textual production, in terms of the existential intensity that accompanies the transformation of experience as it departs from its human modality. Offering a phenomenological description of such self-alienation, I pay particular attention to metamorphoses in the perception of time, space, and life.

Telos, 2009

Without denying the complexity and the heterogeneity of the contemporary philosophies of the even... more Without denying the complexity and the heterogeneity of the contemporary philosophies of the event, I propose to map them on the axis running from appropriation to expropriation. The paradigm cases for the two extremes of this continuum are Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who, largely, fuel the current interest in the notion of the event. Most emblematically, Heidegger's second magnum opus, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), translated as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), both thematizes and traces its own sources back to the event (Ereignis). Heidegger breaks the German word for the event into Er-eignis only to supplement its strict etymology, its derivation from eräugen ("to bring into view or come into view" 2), with the semantic (though not etymological) sense of that which is one's own, eigen. 3 Henceforth, the event will carry ownness within itself and will elliptically designate the event of appropriation. There are no significant contributions to philosophy that do not proceed from this event, which appropriates the first, essentially Greek philosophical origin born in the thought of the pre-Socratics, Plato, or Aristotle and, at the same time, brings into view the second origin, where conceptual philosophy reverts into "inceptual thinking," which, alone, is in the position to encounter the first beginning. 4 In Being and Time, the phenomenological dimension of the event of appropriation, of "bringing into view" and, thereby, providing a nontranscendental condition of possibility for phenomenality, is interpretation

Adolescence, A Syndrome of Ideality

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2007

The recent centennial celebration of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) has b... more The recent centennial celebration of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) has brought to my awareness a major fact likely to shed light on an experience familiar to parents and to psychoanalysts: “polymorphous perversity” of the child has overshadowed adolescence. Of course Freud’s successors have not failed to highlight the characteristic traits, particularly the difficulties and the suffering that occur at adolescence both in the development of a given subject as well as for his or her family. Added to this is the impact of adolescent malaise on the culture of a society and its era. It nevertheless seems to me that our approaches are sidestepped by the two extremes of the psychosexual chain: to begin with the narcissistic polymorphism of the newborn child incites epistemophilic curiosity; and at the end, the paradigm of neurosis with its optimal completion in genitality. We know only too well how fruitful this schema has been. The narcissism of the “polymorphous-perverse-and-theoretician” child has supported both the Kleinian revolution, which at the same time distanced itself from the Freudian model to develop

Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida

Postmodern Culture, 2005

Epoché, 2004

In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche's and Jacques Derrida's philosophies of hi... more In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche's and Jacques Derrida's philosophies of history in terms of the persistence of forgetting within (non-subjective) memory. In section I, I shall outline the totalizing production of history understood as an unsuccessful attempt to erase the indifference of animality and the difference of madness. The following two sections are concerned with the particular kinds of non-subjective memories-memorials-that arise in the aftermath of this erasure and include writing and the archive (section II), as well as the ghostly and genealogical confusions (section III). Throughout these sections I shall argue that each of the externalizations of memory in non-subjective memorials is contaminated by forgetting, both shaping and shaking up the foundations of history. Finally, section IV revisits the memorials and states of forgetting discussed in the previous sections in light of the (im)possibility of justice.

Plant Signaling & Behavior, 2012

T his article aims to bridge phenomenology and the study of plant intelligence with the view to e... more T his article aims to bridge phenomenology and the study of plant intelligence with the view to enriching both disciplines. Besides considering the world from the perspective of sessile organisms, it would be necessary, in keeping with the phenomenological framework, to rethink (1) the meaning of being-sessile and being-in-a-place; (2) the concepts of sentience and attention; (3) how aboveground and underground environments appear to plants; (4) the significance of modular development for our understanding of intelligence; and (5) the concept of communication within and between plants and plant tissues. What emerges from these discussions is the image of a mind embodied in plant life. "It is utterly impossible for human reason […] to hope to understand the generation even of a blade of grass from mere mechanical causes."-Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 77