Book ID: CBB591415511

Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2015)

unapi

In 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. Plant Theory turns to several other thinkers of the high theory generation in an effort to imagine new futures for the ongoing biopolitical debate.

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Reviewed By

Review Gregg Lambert (2016) Review of "Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life". Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology (pp. 401-405). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB591415511/

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Authors & Contributors
Papapetros, Spyros
Tim Cavagnaro
Smith, F. Andrew
Choi, Esther Miriam
Lanzarotta, Tess
Joshua A. Gooch
Concepts
Plant ecology
Biopower
Botany
Biopolitics
Agriculture
Science and race
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, late
21st century
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
Arizona (U.S.)
Tanzania (Tanganyika, Zanzibar)
South America
Sri Lanka
China
Institutions
University of Adelaide (Australia)
Grassland Biome Project
Carnegie Institution of Washington
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