Phytophallogocentrism: Developing a Posthuman Aesthetics through Barthes, Bose, and Woolf

Phytophallogocentrism: Developing a Posthuman Aesthetics through Barthes, Bose, and Woolf

In The Philosopher's Plant, Michael Marder describes Jacques Derrida's philosophy of the plant as “phytophallogocentrism.” Appropriating Derrida's logic of the supplement, Marder adds the affix “phyto” to phallogocentrism to designate a thinking pattern that grows like a plant on the margin of the rigid edifice of Western metaphysics. In this article, I extend this concept of phytophallogocentrism to foster an aesthetics of posthumanism through an interfolding of photography and plants. Both associated with light, photography and plants respond to light mechanically, unlike the humanist tradition which has long associated light with reason. Both the mechanicality involved in photo-making and a plant's life point to an “optical unconscious,” which we may say offers a handful of dirt for the seed of a posthuman aesthetics to grow. In this article, I draw on Roland Barthes's view of photography and Jagadis Chunder Bose's studies of plants to bring to light the zigzagging conceptual bond between the two prefixes, “photo-” and “phyto-,” and the three affixes, “-graph,” “-trope,” and “-troph.” I then read Virginia Woolf's The Waves in light of what I consider to be her phytophallogocentric move. I argue that the phenomena of life presented in the novel are phototrophic and that the text itself is photo-tropic.