Plant Societies and Enlightened Vegetality

Abstract

This chapter investigates the emergence, in the form of an enlightened plant, of utopian theories of vegetal sociability in the eighteenth century, at a time that witnesses the proliferation of schemes for botanical classification and physiological inquiries into plant life. These theories both herald and resist the development of classificatory systems and a biopolitics modeled on vegetal life. Authors Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) and Tiphaigne de la Roche (1722–1774) create new narratives of liberal and rationally-governed societies by peopling them with plants. Yet these utopian visions are not only hopeful, they also bring into view a plant that troubles the very concept of society by existing in a state of utter indifference to need and human desire. Thus these works also make visible the possibility of an alternate conception of modernity in which the plant delivers a powerful critique of enlightenment itself.