Books by Michael Marder

A philosophical guide to passengerhood, with reflections on time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of the senses.While there are entire bookstore sections—and even entire bookstores—devoted to travel, there have been few books on the universal experience of being a passenger. With this book, philosopher Michael Marder fills the gap, offering a philosophical guide to passengerhood. He takes readers from ticketing and preboarding (preface and introduction) through a series of stops and detours (reflections on topics including time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of the senses) to destination and disembarking (conclusion).  Marder finds that the experience of passengers in the twenty-first century is experience itself, stretching well beyond railroad tracks and airplane flight patterns. On his journey through passengerhood, he considers, among many other things, passenger togetherness, which goes hand in hand with passenger loneliness; flyover country and the idea of placeness; and Descartes in an airplane seat. He tells us that the word metaphor means transport in Greek and discusses the gray area between literalness and metaphoricity; explains the connection between reading and riding; and ponders the difference between destination and destiny. Finally, a Beckettian disembarking: you might not be able to disembark, yet you must disembark. After the voyage in the world ends, the journey of understanding begins.

Spanning a decade of Michael Marder's contributions as a public intellectual, Upheavals documents a period of exceptional global turmoil in intellectual, cultural, technological and political spheres.

A musical and philosophical meditation on twelfth-century mystic and Saint Hildegard of Bingen and her vegetal vision of creation.

This book integrates Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit and contemporary conversations about energy. By interpreting actuality as energy in the Hegelian corpus, the author provides a new lens for understanding the dialectical project and the energy-starved condition of our contemporaneity.

Michael Marder is ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent works include¿Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015),¿Dust (2016), The Chernobyl Herbarium (2016), and, with Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives¿(2016).

The question of energy is among the most vital for the future of humanity and the flourishing of life on this planet. Yet, only very rarely (if at all) do we ask what energy is, what it means, what ends it serves, and how it is related to actuality, meaning-making, and instrumentality. 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 "e;energy drinks."e; Its sustained, multi-disciplinary investigation builds a theoretical infrastructure for an alternative energy paradigm.This study unhinges stubbornly held assumptions about energy, conceived in terms of a resource to be violently extracted from the depths of the earth and from certain living beings (such as plants, converted into biofuels), a thing that, teetering on the verge of depletion, sparks off movement and is incompatible with the inertia of rest. Consulting the insights of philosophers, theologians, psychologists and psychoanalysts, economic and political theorists, and physicists, Michael Marder argues that energy is not only a coveted object of appropriation but also the subject who dreams of amassing it; that it not only resides in the dimension of depth but also circulates on the surface; that it activates rest as much as movement, potentiality as much as actuality; and that it is both the means and the end of our pursuits. Ultimately, Marder shows that, instead of being grounded in utopian naivete, the dreams of another energy-to be procured without devastating everything in existence-derive from the suppressed concept of energy itself.

With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes on the basis of sexuate difference.

Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers, trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants.In this book, Michael Marder illuminates the vegetal centerpieces and hidden kernels that have powered theoretical discourse for centuries. Choosing twelve botanical specimens that correspond to twelve significant philosophers, he recasts the development of philosophy through the evolution of human and plant relations. A philosophical history for the postmetaphysical age, The Philosopher's Plant reclaims the organic heritage of human thought. With the help of vegetal images, examples, and metaphors, the book clears a path through philosophy's tangled roots and dense undergrowth, opening up the discipline to all readers.

The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of instrumentality. Reconstructing the life of plants "e;after metaphysics,"e; Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, "e;plant-thinking"e; is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.