Time Is a Plant

A far-reaching reformulation of the philosophy of time guided by vegetal processes, rhythms, tempos, and shapes.

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“Our” world is vegetal. None of it would have been in existence were it not for the life activity of plants. Time, discernible in the rhythms, intervals, logics, articulations, and disarticulations of the world, is the time of plants. Starting from scientific, philosophical, and theological insights into the time of plants, Michael Marder’s new study gently steers readers toward the vegetality of time. Specters and spirits, cosmic trees and phytogenesis, the vegetal apriori and weird chronos, the seeds of events and the branches of divergent chronologies, diachronic phases and symbiotic assemblages join the rich tapestry of this work to proclaim, Time is a plant!



"Michael Marder’s Time Is a Plant is philosophy at its most productive. As far as imaginable from the postmodern conundrum, it states its premise openly in its title and elaborates it in a clear way with impeccable logic. The life of a plant in all its alterations, its generation and decay, is treated as more than just a metaphor of time: it renders visible the innermost structure of the deployment of time. What makes Marder’s book unique is the very feature that makes it naïve in the best sense of the term: Marder ignores all the endless self-reflexive precautions that characterize much of contemporary thought and simply plunges into basic ontological considerations. Time Is a Plant is a breath of fresh air in our stale philosophical scene. It proves that a thing can be done by simply doing it."

-Slavoj Žižek, author of Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed (2022) and Freedom: A Disease without Cure (2023)