‘How like a (Fig) leaf: supplanting shame’

Paper given as part of the 'Experiments in Deconstruction' panel that I convened with Nicole Anderson and Naomi Waltham-Smith.

Recent years have seen growing interest in the subject of plants. However, this paper will not follow a politics of representation that seeks only to redress an absence of attention by adding in the missing plant to a field otherwise construed to be adequate. Rather, it learns from Derrida’s positioning of the ‘animal question’ as not ‘one question amongst others’ but something that, in pushing at the conceptual foundations of metaphysics, shakes the heart of ‘our’ ethical, juridical, and political field. Speculating upon what force the ‘plant question’ might disseminate, the paper engages the crucial work of Elaine Miller and her activation of Luce Irigaray’s ‘efflorescence.’ Rather than propagate the Aristotelian legacy of the ‘vegetative soul’ – a legacy in which the feminine and the vegetal are rooted in passivity as the dumping ground of everything the subject that calls himself ‘man’ fears – they allow for a transplantion of this soul such that natural origins no longer entrench stasis and growth ‘never estranges itself from corporeal existence’ (Irigaray).