Through Vegetal Being by Luce Irigaray

Author:Luce Irigaray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, NAT026000, Nature/Plants
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

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A CULTURE FORGETFUL OF LIFE

The controversy began almost one year prior to the publication of Plant-Thinking. On 28 April 2012, the New York Times featured my opinion piece titled “If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them?” in which I discussed the ethical implications of recent research on the capacities of pea plants to communicate to one another through biochemical substances, released into the soil by the roots. There, I envisioned the ethics of caring for vegetal life that would “not dictate how to treat the specimen of Pisum sativum, or any other plant,” for that matter, but would, rather, “urge us to respond, each time anew, to the question of how, in thinking and eating, to say ‘yes’ to plants.”1

During the weeks and months that followed, my argument was attacked by a wide range of dogmatic opponents, from Christian fundamentalists to vegans and from neuroscientists to humanist rationalists. The heated polemics on the place of plants in our culture turned personal, when I received various pieces of correspondence containing suggestions to commit suicide, wishes for my speedy demise, and the like. The anonymous nature of contemporary communication allowed some readers to spill out their unconscious fantasies and desires, for which the dividing line between someone advocating on behalf of vegetal life and that life itself was quite blurred. In retrospect, it has become evident to me that a small portion of the deadly and nihilistic energy that our culture tends to unleash against life ricocheted in my direction. An affirmation of vegetal existence in its own right was much more than this culture could bear because a long time ago—indeed, at its very roots—it swapped a caring cultivation for the productive destruction of plants.

What brought certain scientists, philosophers, and religious fanatics together was their forgetting of diverse lives in favor of Life, whether conceived as otherworldly existence, or as an objectively decipherable DNA code, or, again, as the purified and sterile “life of the mind.” (The case of vegans was slightly different: they succumbed to a narrow defense of one kind of life, that of animals, at the expense of other kinds of vitality.) It is this forgetting that stands at the source of the grotesque, upside-down world we inhabit, where life-affirming philosophy is perceived as the height of nihilism. A world where concern for plants passes as a lack of care for animals and humans. One where age-old prejudices about the meaning of life and intelligence wear the mask of “common sense” and are counted among the outcomes of “clear, rational thinking.”

When Plant-Thinking was finally released in the beginning of 2013, the reception of the book was highly polarized. Some readers thought that it heralded a new era in our relation to nonhuman life, while others went so far as to raise suspicions that the book was an elaborate hoax.2 What exactly is a hoax? In and of itself, the word is rather telling. Via a not-so-veiled reference to a magical hocus-pocus (mock Latin), it harkens back to the key phrase of the Catholic Eucharist, hoc est corpus meum—“Here is my body.

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