Michael Marder
Biographic Data
| ID | 284960 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Marder |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Marder |
| SIGNATURE | MARDER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Basque Country |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2511-3402 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Dialectics of Energy: From the Concept to Actuality, from Actuality to Virtuality, from Virtuality to
I will consider, first, the positive charge of energeia in Aristotle, who identified it with the actuality of the actual. Then, I will pay attention to the negative charge that re-signifies the term, bestowing on it the exact opposite sense of potentiality. Rather than a radical correction of Aristotle, this polarizing modern signification unfolds in the field prepared in, if also rejected by, Greek Antiquity and unblocks the electric current of …
Prospects for Trump’s Second Term: From Economy to Politics… and Back
The Philosopher’s plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Plotinus’ Anonymous “Great Plant” (chapter 3), Heidegger’s Apple Tree (chapter 10))
The third chapter is dedicated to Plotinus. In six books of the Enneads, Plotinus managed to combine the teaching of the pre-Socratic Parmenides with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. The best idea of Plotinus' philosophy can be formed by analyzing his allegory of the world as a giant tree, a single plant, whose appendages, branches and leaves are everything that exists. At that stage of the development of philosophical thought, the idea of a…
Measuring the value of teachers from traditional certification pathways in Texas: A comprehensive study
While teacher preparation in the United States continues a long period of decline, the largest-producing state, Texas, is experiencing substantial changes in how it prepares teachers. The number of teachers prepared by traditional university pathways continues to decline, and the number from alternative pathways is rising. Using extensive data from Texas, we find that traditionally prepared teachers from universities obtain significantly higher s…
For Another Theology of Nature
The Return of Politics: Of Fire and Other Elements
Ai: Anarchic Intelligence: On Epinoia
With a few notable exceptions, the word "epinoia" has not been heard with a philosophical ear since the time of Epicurus and the Stoics. In addition to the scarce mentions it had received in philosophy, epinoia was strewn across the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes and, more so, across the canonical body of Christian theology, from Patristics-Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor-to the late By…
Vegetal Pedagogy
This chapter, "Vegetal Pedagogy," explores the potential for plants to serve as educators, challenging anthropocentric views of learning. Marder argues that plants offer a unique model of growth, resilience, and interconnectedness, which can inform human pedagogical practices. He examines how plants embody a form of "vegetal wisdom" that emphasizes slowness, adaptation, and sensitivity to the environment. The chapter encourages a shift away from …
Capitalism and the New Political Unconscious: A Philosophy of Immanence
Taking seriously Jacques Lacan’s claim that “the unconscious is politics”, this volume proposes a new understanding of political power, as it interrogates the assumption that contemporary capitalism functions by tapping into people’s forms of unconscious enjoyment, rather than providing transcendental conditions for the articulation of political meanings and desires. Whether we’re aware of it or not, political communication today targets the audi…
The Philosopher’s plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Leibniz’s Blades of Grass (chapter 7), Kant’s Tulip (chapter 8))
The seventh chapter is dedicated to Gottfried Leibniz. In a letter to the English philosopher Samuel Clark, Leibniz recalls the episode in the park in connection with his famous principle of the identity of the indistinguishable, or simply "Leibniz's law". The futile search for two exactly identical leaves or blades of grass highlights a metaphysical principle that extends to the smallest elements of nature. If there are not two exactly the same,…
The philosopher’s plant: An intellectual herbarium (Augustine’s pears (chapter 4), Maimonides palm tree (chapter6))
The journal continues to publish translations of individual chapters of the book by the famous phenomenologist Michael Marder “The Philosopher’s Plant. An Inteellectual Herbarium”. Of the twelve stories, the fourth, “Augustine’s Pears”, and sixth “Maimonides Palm Tree” are selected. In the chapter “Augustine’s Pears” the first avowal in the Confessions of St. Augustine concerns the episode with the theft of pears, which he committed in the compan…
Exilic Ecologies
A term of relatively recent mintage, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology draws on ancient Greek to establish and consolidate its meaning. Although scholars all too often overlook it, the anachronistic rise of ecology in its semantic and conceptual determinations is noteworthy. Formed by analogy with economy, the word may be translated as “the articulation of a dwelling”, the logos of oikos. Here, I argue not only that a vast…
A Philosophy of Stories Plants Tell
Plants are habitually viewed as mute living beings, existing without the possibility of self-expression. In this essay, I suggest that plants not only silently tell us something (indeed, a great deal) about themselves and the world, but also that they tell stories, rendering witness accounts about life and death, light and darkness, middles, beginnings, and ends. After correlating vegetal storytelling with the ancient muthos that survives the ons…
Capitalism and the New Political Unconscious: A Philosophy of Immanence
The Philosopher’s plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Irigaray’s Water Lily (chapter 12))
The journal continues to publish translations of individual chapters of the book by the famous phenomenologist Michael Marder "Plants of Philosophers (Intellectual Herbarium)". Out of twelve stories, "Irigaray’s Water Lily" was chosen. The author analyzes the views of a modern French philosopher Luce Irigaray, whose numerous books contain a feminist revision of traditional philosophy and its language. Today, having thrown off the straitjacket of …
Student learning and teacher retention for graduates of Texas Noyce programs
The shortage of secondary STEM teachers has led to periodic calls over the past four decades for federal intervention. For more than 15 years, the National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program has constituted the most important response at the national level to these calls. The main activity is direct support to undergraduate students and degree holders to become K-12 STEM teachers. Here we examine the Noyce program by look…
The Antinomies of Refugee Reason
My choice of “antinomy” with regard to the predicament of the refugees is a reference to Kant’s philosophy. For Kant, “reason’s natural illusions are not merely revealed by subtle philosophical analysis but unavoidably manifest themselves in the form of actual contradictions each side of which seems ... plausible.”1 In a similar vein, the antinomies of refugee reason are not merely the results of a theoretical exercise but forms of “actual contra…
The Phoenix Complex
The phoenix complex: we are all suffering from it, individually and collectively. It is in us, having become entrenched in minds and bodies over millennia, while we are trapped in it, our practices and infrastructures servicing its many units and component parts. Even more so, the fate of the livable world well beyond the human sphere is hanging in the balance on account of this cross-cultural and transhistorical, in equal measure psychological a…
The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature
An innovative, wide-ranging consideration of the global ecological crisis and its deep philosophical and theological roots. Global crises, from melting Arctic ice to ecosystem collapse and the sixth mass extinction, challenge our age-old belief in nature as a phoenix with an infinite ability to regenerate itself from the ashes of destruction. Moving from antiquity to the present and back, Michael Marder provides an integrated examination of philo…
Plantas e filosofia, plantas ou filosofia
This paper reflects on the current interest of philosophy and sciences in general in plants, especially in view of its collective and decentralized character, which, far from guaranteeing any radical change in thought and in the world, may represent a deepening of the inherent displacing character of capitalism. Thus, starting from the complex (ir)relations between plants and philosophy, the text points to the metaphysical dimension that the deba…
The Philosopher’s plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Herbarium Philosophicum (prologue), Plato’s Plane Tree (chapter 1))
Michael Marder, a well-known specialist in environmental philosophy and political theory, studied at universities in Canada and the United States, received a Ph. D. from the New School of Social Research in New York, and taught at the Universities of Georgetown, Saskatchewan, and Washington. He conducted research at the University of Lisbon and served as an associate professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh before becoming a r…
The Philosopher’s plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Aristotle Wheat (chapter 2), Avicenna’s Celery (chapter 5))
The journal continues to publish translations of chapters of the book by the famous phenomenologist Michael Marder “The Philosopher’s Plants (An Intellectual Herbarium)”. Two of the twelve stories were chosen — “Aristotle's Wheat” and “Avicenna's Celery”. The author analyzes the views of the ancient philosopher Aristotle and the medieval Persian philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) on the nature of plants and their place in the diverse w…
The Ecological Literacies of St. Hildegard of Bingen
Literacy is, literally, a question not of education but of the letter. More than that, it is the question of the letter in the two senses the word has in English: as a symbol of the alphabet and a piece of correspondence. It is my hypothesis that ecological literacies may learn a great deal from the literalization, or even the hyper-literalization, of the letter and that they may do so by turning to the corpus of twelfth-century Benedictine abbes…
The Weirdness of Being in Time: Aristotle, Hegel, and Plants
In this short text, I analyze various senses of being in time. My claim is that time forms a weird interiority through an embrace of whatever is “in” it. I, then, flesh out this claim through a close reading of Book IV in Aristotle's Physics, while grafting each “measure of movement,” through which the Greek philosopher defines time, onto the movements of plants. The result is a twisting and turning, ramified, wayward temporality that holds every…
Hegel's Energy: A Reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit
The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness
The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address.Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events.The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in text…
The Place of Plants: Spatiality, Movement, Growth
Considering the ways in which plants move and shape the places of their growth, this article suggests that performing arts should account for the vegetal (and not only animal) model of movement. The implications of including plants in the category of "moving beings" are vast, as they touch upon the dynamic relation between immanence and transcendence, questions of time-scales appropriate to different kinds of beings and their responses to the env…
Is It Ethical to Eat Plants
The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy
This article examines the possibility of an ethical treatment of plants grounded in empathy. Upon considering whether an empathetic approach to vegetal life is compatible with the crucial features of plant ontology, it is concluded that the feeling of empathy with plants disregards their mode of being and projects the constructs and expectations of the human empathizer onto the object of empathy. Vegetal life, thus, reveals the limits of empathy,…
Energy Dreams: Of Actuality
The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature
An innovative, wide-ranging consideration of the global ecological crisis and its deep philosophical and theological roots. Global crises, from melting Arctic ice to ecosystem collapse and the sixth mass extinction, challenge our age-old belief in nature as a phoenix with an infinite ability to regenerate itself from the ashes of destruction. Moving from antiquity to the present and back, Michael Marder provides an integrated examination of philo…
Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation
"Ranging across philosophy, theology, ecology, psychology, and art, Michael Marder argues that the earth and everything that lives and thinks on it is at an advanced stage of being converted into a dump for industrial output and its by-products feeding consumerism and its excesses. Describing the dump's fundamental characteristics and its effects on the body and mind, he contemplates wider physiological, social, economic, and environmental metabo…
Saint Hildegard's Vegetal Psycho-Physio-Theology
Besides a series of psycho-physiological correspondences between parts of the soul and physical processes, one finds in Hildegard's corpus an entire hagiography and a theography mapped onto parts of plants in a sort of spiritual botany. The analogies mixed together with the non-analogical emanations of viriditas are complex, insofar as they involve particular species of plants or plant organs, psychic faculties, and chief actors in the Judeo-Chri…
Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering
Research Article| February 01 2006 Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering Michael Marder Michael Marder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google New German Critique (2006) 33 (1 (97)): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2005-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Marder; Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering. New Ge…
The Enlightenment, Pyropolitics, and the Problem of Evil
In this article I argue that the ideal of rationality espoused by the European Enlightenment hinges on the separation of the light of reason from heat, with which it had been conjoined in the classical element of fire at least since the Greek antiquity. As a result, evil, from the standpoint of the Enlightenment is tantamount to heat without light, while evil, critically viewed outside this tradition, inheres in the absolute separation between th…
Natality, Event, Revolution: The Political Phenomenology of Hannah Arendt
(2013). Natality, Event, Revolution: The Political Phenomenology of Hannah Arendt. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 44, Life, Truth, Transcendence, pp. 302-320
Retracing capital: Toward a theory of trace in marxian political economy
From ethical theory to semiotics, trace emerges as one of the key concept-metaphors in poststructuralism. In this paper I revisit Marx's monumental Capital—one of the most successful attempts of exposing the inner logic/ontology of capital—through the prism of poststructuralist theory of the trace, especially as it is articulated in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. At the level of the ontology of capital, I shall argue that w…
Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida Michael Marder (bio) Abstract If there is anything that silently underlies the whole corpus of Derrida’s writings and, at the same time, tacitly dialogues with the Western philosophical tradition, it is the notion of the thing. But what is “thinghood” in Derridian philosophy? How does it differ from subjectivity on one hand and objectivity on the other? Under what conditions d…
On Lenin's “Usability,” Or, How to Stay on the Edge
However timely, the contemporary “returns to Lenin” have succeeded only to a limited extent in the task of showing exactly how Lenin's writings and political experiences are useful today. Moreover, the question of the pre-pragmatic usability—as opposed to the utility or usefulness—of these writings and of these experiences remains unaddressed. What are the (unavoidably precarious) conditions of possibility not only for “making use of” but also fo…
Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering
Research Article| February 01 2006 Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering Michael Marder Michael Marder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google New German Critique (2006) 33 (1 (97)): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2005-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Marder; Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering. New Ge…
Terror of the Ethical: On Levinas's Il y a
This essay inquires into the uncanny, unpredictable, and terrifying dimension of Levinasian ethics that retains the trace of impersonal existence or il y a (there is) . After establishing that being, labor, and sense are but folds in the infinite fabric of the there is , the folds that Levinas terms "hypostasis," the article follows the double possibility of their unfolding or unraveling into two infinities: that of il y a and that of the ethical…
The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism
From the Concept of the Political to the Event of Politics
“From the concept of the political to the event of politics”: as always, the title is a promise and a contract. In keeping with this titular undertaking, which outlines a certain itinerary or trajectory, the reader might expect to be guided from the abstract sterility of the concept to the concrete level of political events as they unfold in history, from a higher to a lower level of analysis, from the general to the singular, from the speculativ…
The event of the thing: Derrida's post-deconstructive realism
Jacques Derrida's writings often embed the key themes of deconstruction in a notion of the thing. The Event of the Thing is the most complete examination to date of Derrida's understanding of thinghood and its crucial role in psychoanalysis, ethics, literary theory, aesthetics, and Marxism." "Arguing that the thing, as a figure of otherness, destabilizes the metaphysical edifice it underlies, Michael Marder reveals the contributions it makes to c…
Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plants
Gianni Vattimo, From Z to A
It is only fitting that the readers of Telos should be introduced to the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo at a certain “end” marked by the last lesson he gave on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Turin on October 14, 2008. Announced here is the coming to a close of a lecture course and of a long and illustrious university career, though not the end of an active theoretical and political engagement. (A…
The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium
"The Philosopher's Plant" published on by Columbia University Press.
Of Plants, and Other Secrets
In this article, I inquire into the reasons for the all-too-frequent association of plants and secrets. Among various hypotheses explaining this connection from the standpoint of plant morphology and physiology, the one that stands out is the idea that plants are not only objects in the natural environment, but also subjects with a peculiar mode of accessing the world. The core of the “plant enigma” is, therefore, onto-phenomenological. Positivel…
After the Fire: The Politics of Ashes
Two fires are kindled at the threshold of the metaphysical era, and both are extinguished, almost simultaneously, as soon as metaphysics exhausts itself (or else gets exhausted, tired, fatigued with itself) in its final Nietzschean inversion. The political reality of the twenty-first century is, as a whole, a comet tail of these ancient blazes that, until recently, seemed to be older than time itself, gave the impression of being eternal, undying…
The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy
This article examines the possibility of an ethical treatment of plants grounded in empathy. Upon considering whether an empathetic approach to vegetal life is compatible with the crucial features of plant ontology, it is concluded that the feeling of empathy with plants disregards their mode of being and projects the constructs and expectations of the human empathizer onto the object of empathy. Vegetal life, thus, reveals the limits of empathy,…
La política del fuego: El desplazamiento contemporáneo del paradigma geopolítico
Este artículo teoriza la transición del régimen global geopolítico (es decir, la política de la tierra) a régimen piropolítico, o la política del fuego. En base a filosofía política de Carl Schmitt, la tesis es que la certidumbre, estabilidad y orden arraigados en la tierra están desplazados por la anomia del fuego, como un símbolo y dominio concreto de lo político hoy
Natality, Event, Revolution: The Political Phenomenology of Hannah Arendt
(2013). Natality, Event, Revolution: The Political Phenomenology of Hannah Arendt. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 44, Life, Truth, Transcendence, pp. 302-320
Is It Ethical to Eat Plants
Being Shaken: Ontology and the Event
Despite the fact that over the last twenty years philosophies of the event have become more prevalent, their overall relation to the ontological paradigm remains largely unthought. This collection explores ways in which events destabilize this paradigm, producing powerful tremors that shake Being to its core. This book considers the personal, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and political dimensions of such disquietude, offering a multifaceted ap…
The future and its enemies: In defense of political hope
Building a New World
Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us
Entering into presence with an other is generally submitted to the rules of a world that is presumed to be neutral with respect to each one and to which each one must conform. Communicating with the other would require the neutralization of the singular belonging of each and the adoption of an artificially neutral attitude that cuts us off from our energetic resources. Our natural energy is not yet educated towards a communication with respect fo…
The Enlightenment, Pyropolitics, and the Problem of Evil
In this article I argue that the ideal of rationality espoused by the European Enlightenment hinges on the separation of the light of reason from heat, with which it had been conjoined in the classical element of fire at least since the Greek antiquity. As a result, evil, from the standpoint of the Enlightenment is tantamount to heat without light, while evil, critically viewed outside this tradition, inheres in the absolute separation between th…
The Place of Plants: Spatiality, Movement, Growth
Considering the ways in which plants move and shape the places of their growth, this article suggests that performing arts should account for the vegetal (and not only animal) model of movement. The implications of including plants in the category of "moving beings" are vast, as they touch upon the dynamic relation between immanence and transcendence, questions of time-scales appropriate to different kinds of beings and their responses to the env…
Anti-Nomad
This brief text offers a critique of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of nomadism. It is shown that ‘nomadism’ functions as a compilation of unresolved contradictions, such as those of movement and rest, anarchy and order, numeric abstraction and concrete placement. I argue that, in the last instance, this concept bears allegiance to its etymological provenance from the Greek nomos and that it veers on the side of an economy, rather th…
An Ode to Amekhania
Research Article| December 01 2016 An Ode to Amekhania Michael Marder Michael Marder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2016) 24 (2): 151–160. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.24.2.0151 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Marder; An Ode to Amekhania. Qui Parle 1 December 2016; 24 (2): 151–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.24.2.0151 Do…
Philosophy (40 works) · Political science (33 works) · Epistemology (31 works) · Law (26 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Art (16 works) · History (16 works) · Law (15 works)