Life of Plants

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

• Acknowledgments ixAuthor’s Preface xiI Prologue1 On Plants, or the Origin of Our World 32 The Extension of the Domain of Life 73 On Plants, or the Life of the Spirit 124 Toward a Philosophy of Nature 17II Leaf Theory: The Atmosphere of the World5 Leaves 256 Tiktaalik roseae 297 In Open Air: Ontology of the Atmosphere 358 The Breath of the World 549 Everything Is in Everything 66III Theory of the Root: The Life of the Stars10 Roots 7711 The Deepest Are the Stars 86IV Theory of the Flower: The Reason of Forms12 Flowers 9913 Reason Is Sex 105V Epilogue14 On Speculative Autotrophy 11315 Like an Atmosphere 119Notes 123

“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