In our age of ecological disaster, this book joins the growing philosophical literature on vegetable life to ask how our present debates about biopower and animal studies change if we take plants as a linchpin for thinking about biopolitics. Logically enough, the book uses animal studies as a way into the subject, but it does so in unexpected ways. Upending critical approaches of biopolitical regimes, it argues that it is plants rather than animals that are the forgotten and abjected forms of life under humanist biopower. Indeed, biopolitical theory has consistently sidestepped the issue of vegetable life, and more recently, has been outright hostile to it. Provocatively, Jeffrey T. Nealon wonders whether animal studies, which has taken the "inventor" of biopower himself to task for speciesism, has not misread Foucault, thereby managing to extend humanist biopower rather than to curb its reach. Nealon is interested in how and why this is the case. Plant Theory turns to several other thinkers of the high theory generation in an effort to imagine new futures for the ongoing biopolitical debate. "In this powerful and original book, Jeffrey Nealon engages some of today's urgent problems, giving us a new perspective on both the ethical issues raised by recent work in animal studies and related disciplines and the political issues at stake in any analysis of biopower and neoliberalism."―Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University "Ironic but mercifully not postmodern, patient and eminently readable, Jeffrey Nealon's book engages with and ultimately calls into question some of the guiding principles of animal studies. It is without question a singular contribution to recent research on biopolitics, animal studies, and the burgeoning field of 'plant theory.'"―Timothy Campbell, Cornell University "Jeffrey Nealon's deeply thoughtful and strongly felt meditation on the meaning of "life" will surprise you on every page."―John McGowan, Symploke Jeffrey T. Nealon is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Plant Theory Biopower And Vegetable Life By Jeffrey T. Nealon STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8047-9675-0 Contents Preface: Plant Theory?, Acknowledgments, Abbreviations, 1. The First Birth of Biopower: From Plant to Animal Life in Foucault, 2. Thinking Plants with Aristotle and Heidegger, 3. Animal and Plant, Life and World in Derrida; or, The Plant and the Sovereign, 4. From the World to the Territory: Vegetable Life in Deleuze and Guattari; or, What Is a Rhizome?, Coda: What Difference Does It Make?, Notes, Index, CHAPTER 1 THE FIRST BIRTH OF BIOPOWER From Plant to Animal Life in Foucault IF CROSS-DISCIPLINARY MOVEMENTS in the North American university function like financial instruments (which, of course, they do and they don't), the strongest "buy" orders of recent years would have to come from the burgeoning discourse surrounding biopower and the related body of work dedicated to animal studies. I suppose this book itself attests to continuing scholarly interest in biopower. And animal studies, for its part, has made a strong pitch to be the "next big thing" in the academy, or so the New York Times has announced. These two emerging fields of practice are, of course, intimately related: if biopolitical studies began by pointing out that questions pertaining to human "life" have become the political topics of the modern era (revolving around practices of identity, health, and sexuality), animal studies steps in to show how that notion of human-centered biopower is itself based on an originary exclusion and abjection of its other, animal life. In classic deconstructive form (Jacques Derrida is in fact one of the most often cited figures), animal studies shows how the privileged term of biopower (human life itself) is made possible and remains hegemonic through its illegitimate forgetting of animal life: the hidden suffering and slaughter of animals on the factory farm literally makes the on-the-go meals available for the Homo economicus of biopower, today's busy lifestyle consumer. Not surprisingly, Michel Foucault's work figures quite prominently in these emerging fields of study: Foucault of course coins the word biopower in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. And in his lecture courses touching on the concept ( Society Must Be Defended and The Birth of Biopolitics ) Foucault discusses the ways in which biopower might differ from the form of power he famously calls "discipline" (which aims at modifying individual behaviors and is always mediated through institutions). As Foucault explains in his 1975–76 lecture course Society Must Be Defended, biopower constitutes a new technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary. This technology of power does not exclude the former, does not exclude disciplin