Radical Botany

Abstract

Radical Botany uncovers a long speculative tradition of plant fiction that conjures up new languages to grasp the life of plants—their vegetality—in all its specificity and vigor. The first part of the book reaches back to seventeenth-century materialisms to show how plants, rather than being systematically excluded from human deliberation, have in fact participated in modernity. The French authors with whom the work begins turn to plants to think through the problems and paradoxes that face all forms of life considered first as matter. Within this framework, plants are ascribed an agency and vitality that might otherwise seem foreign to them, but they are also envisioned as beings that resist incorporation into human contexts and thus have something to teach humans about their limitations and vulnerabilities. Classically, the botanical sciences that develop over the course of the long eighteenth century function as a project for ordering, visualizing, labeling, and classifying life. In Radical Botany, the authors unearth an alternative set of engagements with the plant as a life form—a tradition that conceives of vegetal life as resisting representability even as it participates in the production of new representational modes—including the novel, early cinema, and contemporary virtual reality—and new affects—including queer desires, feminist affinities, and ecological solidarities. The radical botanical works this book explores not only prioritize plants as active participants in “their” world but suggest that the apparent passivity of plants can function as a powerful destabilizing force in its own right.