Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Obodiac, Erin

Titel

Radical Friends: Botany and Us: A review of Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction

Ist Teil von

• Postmodern Culture, 2020-05, Vol.30 (3)

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• While experimenting concretely with that practice, we were forced to accept that our work process and its outcome were no longer tied to an individual sense of self, nor did they affirm our limits or boundaries as individual scholars. (vii) Taking up Deleuze and Guattari's precepts of "becoming-plant," "rhizome," and "follow the plants," Meeker and Szabari pledge their allegiance to vegetal allies whose mode of being is "neither individuated nor autonomous but collective, swarming, multiple" (xi). "2 Although Meeker and Szabari follow Deleuze rather than being led down Derrida's phyto-deconstructive garden path, they give to the plant a kind of radical priority that retrieves its peculiar vitality and animation from the margins (no longer mere Aristotelian threptikon or nutritive capacity of the vegetal soul) and dislodges the humanistic imperative from its lofty bell tower (the perpetual echo chamber of reason's sovereignty). Despite the cosmic dimensions of the Plant Turn, Meeker and Szabari remain close to their disciplinary field and begin their account of radical botany thus "in seventeenth-century France with the gradual development of a botanically oriented thought that accords power and vitality to vegetal life in ways that trouble orthodox modes of classification" (1). Yet, in an ambivalent gesture that becomes a strategy for their book as a whole, Meeker and Szabari begin the early chapter "Libertine Botany and Vegetal Modernity" with the works of Guy de La Brosse, who founded the Jardin de Roi, a kind of research garden expanding the (human) knowledge of plant chemistry for philanthropic purposes (botanical remedies for the poor).