Life of Plants

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.

• AcknowledgmentsI. Prologue1. On Plants, or the Origin of Our World2. The Extension of the Domain of Life3. On Plants, or the Life of the Spirit4. Toward a Philosophy of NatureII. Leaf Theory: The Atmosphere of the World5. Leaves6. Tiktaalik roseae7. In Open Air: Ontology of the Atmosphere8. The Breath of the World9. Everything is in EverythingIII. Theory of the Root: The Life of the Stars10. Roots11. The Deepest are the StarsIV. Theory of the Flower: The Reason of Forms12. Flowers13. Reason is SexV. Epilogue14. On Speculative Autotrophy15. Like an AtmosphereNotes

“Back to animals! Back to mushrooms! And now back to plants! It is with plants that this marvellous, witty, and immensely literate book wants us, the human readers, to get acquainted again. And, of course, with plants it is actually toward the sun that we are reoriented. Philosophy is on the move again, not exactly forward but downward, giving a completely different meaning to what counts as a foundation to thought.” Bruno Latour“The view of life as interdependence is a particularly affecting and relevant way to think about living and coping in the Anthropocene, when the ways that humans affect the literal composition of the atmosphere has become the existential question of our time.”The Nation