Thoreau’s Garden Politics (re-edition)

Bibliographic Data

ID21991870
AuthorsAntoine Traisnel (Marymount University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume27
Publication date2023-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMiranda (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2108-6559 • E-ISSN: 2108-6559
PublisherOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/miranda.52145
OpenAlexW4362711234
LanguageEN
References cited18

This essay responds to the emergence of the plant as a new subject in contemporary theory. It focuses on two recent books that put vegetable life at the center of their analyses in an effort to reassess the political landscape of Western modernity from the ground up. Yet in the face of increasingly urgent climate disasters, these books seem oddly demobilizing in their injunction to cultivate a more contemplative, less decisive disposition. To make sense of this paradox, I look to Henry David Thoreau’s botanical ruminations in Walden. Notwithstanding plant theory’s claim that 19th century Western thought entirely disregarded the importance of plant life, Thoreau explicitly troubles the assumption that one has the “right” to kill and use certain plants for one’s benefit. Not unlike our plant theorists, he invites his readers to adopt a “much slower” pace so they may gain a “more intimate” knowledge of the living economy in which they partake. But Thoreau goes beyond elaborating a speculative ethics modeled after the way plants live. What he models, rather, is a pragmatic politics of planting that confronts head-on the thorny issues of death and violence and, as such, delineates the contours of a biopolitics capable of accounting for vegetal life

Aesthetics · Contemplation · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Flourishing · Geography · Ideology · Modernity · Pace · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Thoreau and American Literature

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Open DOIOpen Access