{"product_id":"plant-theory-biopower-and-vegetable-life-paperback-softback-9780804796750","title":"Plant Theory; Biopower and Vegetable Life (Paperback \/ softback) 9780804796750","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003ePlant Theory\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eBiopower and Vegetable Life\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eJeffrey T. Nealon (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780804796750\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003ePaperback \/ softback, published 14 October 2015\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e168 pages\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 1 cm, 0.272 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\"In this powerful and original book, Jeffrey Nealon engages some of today's urgent problems, giving us a new perspective on both the ethical issues raised by recent work in animal studies and related disciplines and the political issues at stake in any analysis of biopower and neoliberalism.\"—Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University \"Ironic but mercifully not postmodern, patient and eminently readable, Jeffrey Nealon's book engages with and ultimately calls into question some of the guiding principles of animal studies. It is without question a singular contribution to recent research on biopolitics, animal studies, and the burgeoning field of 'plant theory.'\"—Timothy Campbell, Cornell University \"Jeffrey Nealon's deeply thoughtful and strongly felt meditation on the meaning of \"life\" will surprise you on every page.\"—John McGowan, \u003ci\u003eSymploke\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn our age of ecological disaster, this book joins the growing philosophical literature on vegetable life to ask how our present debates about biopower and animal studies change if we take plants as a linchpin for thinking about biopolitics. Logically enough, the book uses animal studies as a way into the subject, but it does so in unexpected ways. Upending critical approaches of biopolitical regimes, it argues that it is plants rather than animals that are the forgotten and abjected forms of life under humanist biopower. Indeed, biopolitical theory has consistently sidestepped the issue of vegetable life, and more recently, has been outright hostile to it. Provocatively, Jeffrey T. Nealon wonders whether animal studies, which has taken the \"inventor\" of biopower himself to task for speciesism, has not misread Foucault, thereby managing to extend humanist biopower rather than to curb its reach. Nealon is interested in how and why this is the case. \u003ci\u003ePlant Theory\u003c\/i\u003e turns to several other thinkers of the high theory generation in an effort to imagine new futures for the ongoing biopolitical debate.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"toc\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"toc-header\"\u003eContents and Abstracts\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tocline\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"chapnumandtitle\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"chapnum\"\u003e0\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"chaptitle\"\u003ePreface: Plant Theory?\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"trigger abstract no-print\"\u003e chapter abstract\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"abstract\"\u003eThe Preface discusses biopolitical discourse's strange elision of vegetable life (especially within Animal Studies), and suggests that if we really do want to take the discussion of life and power beyond the human, we might want to look at vegetable life as well. Likewise, the preface argues that Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze \u0026amp;\u003cbr\u003e Guattari are privileged sites for thinking about vegetable life.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tocline\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"chapnumandtitle\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"chapnum\"\u003e1\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"chaptitle\"\u003eThe First Birth of Biopower: From Plant to Animal Life in Foucault\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"trigger abstract no-print\"\u003e chapter abstract\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"abstract\"\u003eChapter 1 looks at the \"\u003cbr\u003efirst birth of biopower\"\u003cbr\u003e in Michel Foucault's 1966 The Order of Things. There Foucault suggests, contra Animal Studies, that it is not the animal who is the \"\u003cbr\u003eother\"\u003cbr\u003e of the biopolitical human, but the plant. In the turn to \"\u003cbr\u003elife\"\u003cbr\u003e as a kind of obsessive topic in the humanities in the early 19th century, the animal took over from the plant as the primary marker for what all life is, and how human life works (as infinite \"\u003cbr\u003eanimal\"\u003cbr\u003e desire). This Chapter then goes on to examine critically Giorgio Agamben's work on Foucault.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tocline\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"chapnumandtitle\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"chapnum\"\u003e2\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"chaptitle\"\u003eThinking Plants, with Aristotle and Heidegger\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"trigger abstract no-print\"\u003e chapter abstract\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"abstract\"\u003eChapter 2 examines the philosophical background for the turn to \"\u003cbr\u003elife\"\u003cbr\u003e in contemporary theory, focusing its reading especially on Aristotle's De Anima and Heidegger's The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. The chapter looks closely at what these foundational thinkers have to say about vegetable life, and how it relates to their thinking on human and animal life.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tocline\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"chapnumandtitle\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"chapnum\"\u003e3\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"chaptitle\"\u003eAnimal and Plant, Life and World in Derrida\u003cbr\u003e or, The Plant and the Sovereign\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"trigger abstract no-print\"\u003e chapter abstract\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"abstract\"\u003eChapter 3 takes up Derrida's work on animality, and focuses on his strange elision of plant life within his extensive interrogation of animal life. Several times Derrida brings up the status of vegetable life within the discourse of animality, but each and every time he simply passes over offering a sustained analysis of plant life. By backtracking from his work on animality to his 1974 Glas, this chapter tries to suture that gap in Derrida's work. This chapter concludes by arguing that Derrida's work on emergence (physis, Walten) is the key to thinking about vegetable life in his work, and offers a challenge to the charge of \"\u003cbr\u003ecorrelationism\"\u003cbr\u003e leveled against deconstruction.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tocline\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"chapnumandtitle\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"chapnum\"\u003e4\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"chaptitle\"\u003eFrom the World to the Territory: Vegetable Life in Deleuze and Guattari\u003cbr\u003e or, What is a Rhizome?\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"trigger abstract no-print\"\u003e chapter abstract\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"abstract\"\u003eChapter 4 highlights Deleuze and Guattari's attempts, following Simondon, to think \"\u003cbr\u003elife\"\u003cbr\u003e outside the individual organism, thereby offering us a more robust and distributed notion of life (and death) as a kind of mesh or swarm of forms of life, rather than an individual organism striving to maintain its life at all costs. Going forward, I suggest this may be the only way to think about \"\u003cbr\u003elife\"\u003cbr\u003e in a world facing ecological disaster.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tocline\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"chapnumandtitle\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"chapnum\"\u003e5\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"chaptitle\"\u003eWhat Difference Does It Make?\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"trigger abstract no-print\"\u003e chapter abstract\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"abstract\"\u003eThe Coda suggests the myriad ways that taking vegetable life seriously as a form of life would change current debates about the fate of the human. Plants are of course the basis of the food chain on land and in the sea, and if one is concerned about the neoliberal corporate patenting of life, this chapter suggests that one look closely at the plant kingdom, where it's already happened.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"Stanford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52685680640280,"sku":"9780804796750","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/plant-theory-biopower-and-vegetable-life-paperback-softback-9780804796750","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}