Anna Piroska Tóth: Sitting on the table together– senses of the vegetal or vegetal non-sense

Thesis Advisors: Amit Rai & Florian Göttke

Thesis: Sitting on the table together– senses of the vegetal or vegetal non-sense

July 2024 

Abstract

This text is an exploration around, about, with, through the vegetal by trying to use language, writing as a tool, an instrument and a matter, an ingredient. It’s a so deformation of what a thesis is, transforming it into a suite of wanderings, proposals, musings. It aims to embrace the visual and sonic materiality of the written word in order to question, make tremble, destabilise meanings, senses attributed to words that haunt or that are haunted by vegetality. It is inspired by, builds on the work of researchers, theorists, philosophers, writers who have been speculating and contributing to the emergence and actualization of what has been called theplanthroposcene, a movement, a turn in relationality with the plants, advocating for being in touch and conspiring with them. By expanding the field of research, including other terms (vegetal, vegetative, vegetable) and looking at the fluidity, the uncertainties they might contain, this text is also an attempt to challenge the alterity that has been drawn between vegetality and humanity and hence disturb the notion of the human, acknowledging the ungraspable complexity that envelops existences we identify as others and what we call us.

Author Anna Piroska Tóth