I had the idea for this book during a visit to the temple of Fushimi Inari in Kyoto in March 2009, with Davide Stimilli and Shinobu Iso. But I had to wait for a yearlong visit to Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies to bring it to fruition and to find the time necessary to draft it.

I would like to thank David Freedberg and Barbara Faedda, who warmly welcomed me and, with attention and friendship, made possible numerous human and scientific exchanges. Nothing would have been possible without conversations with and daily support from Fabian Ludueña Romandini. Caterina Zanfi played a major role in the genesis of this book: I thank her greatly. To Guido Giglioni I owe the discovery of the long naturalist tradition during the Renaissance and the early modern period. Nora Philippe read, reread, and commented on a preliminary version of the manuscript; her criticisms and suggestions have been crucial.

The conversations between Paris and New York, with Frédérique Aît-Touati, Emmanuel Alloa, Marcello Barison, Chiara Bottici, Cammy Brothers, Barbara Carnevali, Dorothée Charles, Emanuele Clarizio, Michela Coccia, Emanuele Dattilo, Chiara Franceschini, Daniela Gandorfer, Peter Goodrich, Donatien Grau, Camille Henrot, Noreen Khawaja, Alice Leroy, Henriette Michaud, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Christine Rebet, Olivier Souchard, Michele Spanò, Justin Steinberg, Peter Szendy, and Lucas Zwirner, have been essential. Lidia Breda supported and accompanied this project from the start, with a friendship and force that only she is capable of; I thank her ever so much. Finally, I thank Renaud Paquette, who erased the signs of stammering from my French and allowed the manuscript to come into its own.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my twin brother Matteo: it is with him by my side that I began to breathe.

From the age of fourteen to the age of nineteen, I was a student in an agricultural high school in a small isolated town in the farmland of central Italy. I was there to learn “a real job.” So, instead of devoting myself to the study of classical languages, literature, history, and mathematics, like all of my friends, I spent my adolescence immersed in books on botany, plant pathology, agricultural chemistry, market gardens, and entomology. Plants, with their needs and illnesses, were the privileged objects of all study that took place in this school. This daily and prolonged exposure to beings that were initially so far away from me left a permanent mark on my perspective on the world. This book is the attempt to revive the ideas produced by those five years spent contemplating their nature, their silence, and their apparent indifference to everything we call “culture.”

It is therefore manifest that there is but one substance, not only of all bodies, but also of all souls, and that substance is nothing other than God himself. The substance from which all bodies are made is called matter; the substance from which all souls are made is called reason or mind. Therefore it is manifest that God is the reason of all souls and the matter of all bodies.

David de Dinant

This is a blue planet, but it is a green world.

Karl J. Niklas

We barely speak of them and their name escapes us. Philosophy has always overlooked them, more out of contempt than out of neglect.¹ They are the cosmic ornament, the inessential and multicolored accident that reigns in the margins of the cognitive field. The contemporary metropolis views them as superfluous trinkets of urban decoration. Outside the city walls, they are hosts—weeds—or objects of mass production. Plants are the always open wound of the metaphysical snobbery that defines our culture. The return of the repressed, of which we must rid ourselves in order to consider ourselves as “different”: rational humans, spiritual beings. They are the cosmic tumor of humanism, the waste that the absolute spirit can’t quite manage to eliminate. The life sciences have neglected them, too.* “Current biology, conceived of on the basis of our knowledge of animals, pays no attention to plants”—“the standard evolutionary literature is zoocentric.”² And biology manuals approach plants “in bad faith,” “as decorations on the tree of life, rather than as the forms that have allowed the tree itself to survive and grow.”³

The problem is not just one of epistemological deficiency: “as animals, we identify much more immediately with other animals than with plants.”⁴ In this spirit, scientists, radical ecology, and civil society have fought for decades for the liberation of animals;⁵ and affirming the separation between human and animal (the anthropological machine of which philosophy speaks)⁶ has become commonplace in the intellectual world. By contrast, it seems that no one ever wanted to question the superiority of animal life over plant life and the rights of life and death of the former over those of the latter. A form of life without personality and without dignity, it does not seem to deserve any spontaneous empathy, or the exercise of a moralism that higher living beings are capable of eliciting.⁷ Our animal chauvinism⁸ refuses to go beyond “an animal language that does not lend itself to a relation to plant truth.”⁹ In a sense, antispecies animalism is just another form of anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism: it extends human narcissism to the animal realm.

Plants are untouched by this prolonged negligence: they affect a sovereign indifference toward the human world, the culture of civilizations, the succession of domains and ages. Plants seem absent, as though lost in a long, deaf, chemical dream. They don’t have senses, but they are far from being shut in on themselves: no other being adheres to the world that surrounds it more than plants do. They don’t have the eyes or ears that may have allowed them to distinguish the forms of the world and to multiply its image through the iridescence of colors and sounds that we give it.¹⁰ They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. Plants do not run, they cannot fly; they are not capable of privileging a specific place in relation to the rest of space, they have to remain where they are. Space, for them, does not crumble into a heterogeneous chessboard of geographical difference; the world is condensed into the portion of ground and sky they occupy. Unlike most higher animals, they have no selective relation to what surrounds them: they are, and cannot be other than, constantly exposed to the world around them. Plant life is life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment. It is for the sake of adhering as much as possible to the world that they develop a body that privileges surface over volume: “In plants, the very high proportion of surface to volume is one of the most characteristic traits. It is through this vast surface, literally spread in the environment, that plants absorb from the space the diffuse resources that are necessary to their growth.”¹¹ Their absence of movement is nothing but the reverse of their complete adhesion to what happens to them and their environment. One cannot separate the plant—neither physically nor metaphysically—from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world. To interrogate plants means to understand what it means to be in the world. Plants embody the most direct and elementary connection that life can establish with the world. The opposite is equally true: the plant is the purest observer when it comes to contemplating the world in its totality. Under the sun or under the clouds, mixing with water and wind, their life is an endless cosmic contemplation, one that does not distinguish between objects and substances—or, to put differently, one that accepts all their nuances to the point of melting with the world, to the point of coinciding with its very substance. We will never be able to understand a plant unless we have understood what the world is.

They live at astral distances from the human world, like nearly all other living beings. This separation is not simply a cultural illusion; it is of a much deeper nature and its root can be found in metabolism.

The survival of the near totality of living beings presupposes the existence of other living beings: every form of life requires that there be life in the world already. Humans need the life produced by animals and plants. And higher animals would not survive without the life they exchange among themselves, thanks to the process of nourishment. To live is essentially to live the life of another: to live in and through the life that others have been able to construct or invent. There is a sort of parasitism, a universal cannibalism, that belongs to the domain of the living: it feeds off itself, without realizing that it needs other forms and modes of existence. As though life in its most complex and articulated forms is never anything but an immense cosmic tautology: it presupposes itself and produces nothing other than itself. This is why life seems impossible to explain other than starting from itself. As for plants, they represent the only breach in the self-referentiality of the living.

In this sense, higher life seems never to have had immediate relations with the inanimate world: the first environment of any living being is that of the individuals of its own species or of other species. Life seems to have to be its own environment, its own site. Plants alone break this topological rule of self-inclusion. They have no need for the mediation of other beings in order to survive. Nor do they desire it. They require nothing but the world, nothing but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light. They see the world before it gets inhabited by forms of higher life; they see the real in its most ancestral forms. Or rather they find life where no other organism reaches it. They transform everything they touch into life, they make out of matter, air, and sunlight what, for the rest of the living, will be a space of habitation, a world. Autotrophy—the name given to this Midas-like power of nutrition, the one that allows plants to transform into nourishment everything they touch and everything there is—is not just a radical form of alimentary autonomy; it is above all the capacity that plants have to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body, [to transform] the deformed, disparate matter of the world into a coherent, well-ordered, and unified reality.

If it is from plants that we ought to enquire what the world is, this is because they are the ones who “play the world” [“font le monde”]. For the vast majority of organisms, the world is the product of plant life, the product of the colonization of the planet by plants, since time immemorial. Not only is it the case that “the animal organism is constructed entirely and simply from the organic substances produced by plants,”¹ but “higher plants represent about 99% of the eukaryotic biomass of the planet.”² All the objects and tools that surround us come from plants (nourishment, furniture, clothes, fuel, medicine). Most importantly, the entire higher animal life (which has an aerobic nature) feeds off the organic exchange of gases between these beings (oxygen). Our world is a world of plants before it is a world of animals.

It was Aristotelianism that, before any other philosophy, took into account the liminal position of plants, describing them as a universal principle of animation and ensoulment [psychisme]. For the Aristotelianism of antiquity and the Middle Ages, vegetative life, psuchē trophukē (literally “nursing/feeding/vegetative soul”), was not simply a distinct class of specific forms of life or a taxonomic unity separated from others, but rather a place shared by all living beings, regardless of the distinction between plants, animals, and humans. It was a principle through which “life belongs to all living things.”³

For plants, life starts by defining itself as circulation of living beings and, because of this, constitutes itself in dissemination of forms, in difference between species, realms, and modes of life. They are not always intermediaries, agents of the cosmic threshold between the living and the non-living, spirit and matter. Their arrival on firm ground and their proliferation have made it possible to produce the quantity of matter and organic mass of which higher life is composed and from which it nourishes itself. But also—and this in the first place—they have transformed for good the face of our planet: it is through photosynthesis that oxygen came to feature so heavily in our atmosphere;⁴ it is thanks to our plants and their life that higher animal organisms can produce the energy necessary for survival. It is through them and with their help that our planet produces its atmosphere and makes breath possible for the beings that cover its outer skin. The life of plants is a cosmogony in action, the constant genesis of our cosmos. Botany, in this sense, has to rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all the forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities, domestic titans that do not need violence to found new worlds.

pneuma