Michael Marder Book order

Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey’s phenomenology of place and Michael Marder’s plant-thinking.

"A little guide intended to be consumed in one long-distance airplane flight for the general reader to extract the philosophical implications of the condition forced upon them. To be read with some nostalgia under current pandemic conditions or, more likely, to be utilized as we shift back to traveling in a post-pandemic world"-- Provided by publisher

We entrust readers with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images - one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable as it is, we insist on the need to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize it, taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.

Focusing on a decade of Michael Marder's insights, this work explores a time marked by significant global upheaval across various domains, including intellectual discourse, cultural shifts, technological advancements, and political changes. It highlights Marder's role as a public intellectual during these transformative years, offering a critical examination of the challenges and developments that shaped the contemporary landscape.

""Green Mass" is a meditation on-and with-twelfth-century Christian mystic and polymath Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Attending to Hildegard's vegetal vision, which greens theological tradition and imbues plant life with spirit, philosopher Michael Marder uncovers a verdant mode of thinking. The ensuing work stages a fresh encounter between present-day and pre-modern concerns, ecology and theology, philosophy and mysticism, the material and the spiritual, in word and sound. Hildegard's lush notion of "viriditas," the vegetal power of creation, is emblematic of her deeply entwined understanding of physical reality and spiritual elevation. From blossoming flora to burning desert, Marder plays with the symphonic multiplicity of meanings in her thought, listening to the resonances between the ardency of holy fire and the aridity of a world aflame. Across Hildegard's cosmos, we hear the anarchic proliferation of her ecological theology, in which both God and greening are circular, without beginning or end. Accompanied by Peter Schuback's musical movements, which echo both Hildegard's own compositions and key themes in each chapter of the book, this multifaceted work creates a resonance chamber, in which to discover a radical vision of the living world anew"--

Ranging across philosophy, theology, ecology, psychology, and art, in Dump Philosophy Michael Marder argues that the earth, along with 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.Every day, scientific studies, media reports, and first-hand accounts of the rapidly deteriorating state of the environment hit us with a growing and disconcerting force. Trends such as microplastics in water, airborne toxins, topsoil degradation, and dangerous levels of carbon dioxide have upset the delicate ecological balance that has until now been sustaining life on the planet.Marder's original treatise paints a portrait of the Anthropocene as a global dump which wreaks havoc, causing disease and degrading our sensation, perception, and thinking, so that nuance is lost and ideas are reduced to soundbites in chains of free association. Describing the dump's fundamental characteristics and its effects on the body and the mind, he contemplates wider physiological, social, economic, and environmental metabolisms in the age of dumping, as well as the role of philosophy caught in its crosshairs. While surveying the devastation that is the reality of the twenty-first century, the book provides a frightening and yet intellectually spellbinding glimpse of the future.

Michael Marder proposes a new methodology for political science and philosophy, one which he terms categorial thinking. Under this lens, the political appears not as a singular concept but as a family of categories, allowing room for new, plural, and often antagonistic ideas about the state, the people, sovereignty, and power.

Energy Dreams interrogates the ontology of energy from the first coinage of the word energeia by Aristotle to the current practice of fracking and the popularity of energy drinks.

We entrust readers with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images - one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable as it is, we insist on the need to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize it, taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.