Keynote Lecture II "Vegetal Ontology, as seen through Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Herbarium"
Prof. Michael Marder
Keynote Lecture "Vegetal Ontology, as seen through Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Herbarium" with Prof. Michael Marder
It is hard to tell where, in Emily Dickinson’s corpus, plants end and words begin. An avid gardener and herbarium-maker, she had the habit of sending pressed plants together with her letters and poems to family and friends. Dickinson's poems spoke silently from, with, and through flower arrangements—and often enough they did so about flowers. Not only the form and the content of the messages were vegetal; so was also the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds, spores or grains of pollen, preceded by lovingly tending to plants in a garden or at a “conservatory” (hothouse), walking in forests and meadows, gathering and preserving flowers. For Emily, an herbarium was a poetry collection, while a poetry collection was an herbarium, expressing fragility and tenacious preservation, humid vitality and dryness, mortality and a vibrant afterlife of mortal remains, vegetal and human. In this talk, I propose to delve into her poetic herbarium, in order to get a better sense of the threads crisscrossing vegetal ontology, including not only life, death, and survival, but also singular multiplicity, a capacious non-identity, and ecstatic being.
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Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013); The Philosopher’s Plant (2014); Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020); Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel's Energy (2021); Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and, with Edward S. Casey, The Place of Plants (2024).
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