Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants

Description

This book introduces the reader to the exciting new field of plant philosophy and takes it in a new direction to ask: what does it mean to say that plants are sexed? Do 'male' and 'female' really mean the same when applied to humans, trees, fungi and algae? Are the zoological categories of sex really adequate for understanding the - uniquely 'dibiontic' - life cycle of plants? Vegetal Sex addresses these questions through a detailed analysis of major moments in the history of plant sex, from Aristotle to the modern day. Tracing the transformations in the analogy between animals and plants that characterize this history, it shows how the analogy still functions in contemporary botany and asks: what would a non-zoocentric, plant-centred philosophy of vegetal sex be like? By showing how philosophy and botany have been and still are inextricably entwined, Vegetal Sex allows us to think vegetal being and, perhaps, to recognize the vegetal in us all.

Stella Sandford is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University London, UK. She is author of numerous works including Plato and Sex (2010), How to Read Beauvoir (2006), and The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (2000) and co-editor, with Mandy Merck, of Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (2010) and, with Peter Osborne, Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (2002).

Vegetal Sex demands to be read: not only as a critical history that transforms what we took for granted about the sex of plants into a problem for thought, but also as a rigorous reframing of the category of sex in general and a manifesto for a renewed plant-philosophy. * Daniel Whistler, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK * Critically examining a long botanical tradition that speaks about "male" and "female" plants, Stella Sandford's Vegetal Sex is a lucid, rigorous philosophical analysis that asks what it would mean to stop projecting human sexuality onto plants. The irreducible specificity of vegetal sex is shown here to have the power of challenging our general understanding of sexuality, emerging from this analysis as open and ambiguous. * Antonia Szabari, Associate Professor, University of Southern California, USA *