"
What do plants think? And can they really think? In "O pensamento vegetal" (Plant Thought ), writer, critic, professor, and visual artist Evando Nascimento proposes to reflect and imagine, beyond the human cogito, zones of contact between plants and literature.
Plants cannot speak, but plant sensitivity and intelligence emerge in writings throughout the centuries. Both in classical modernity, such as those of Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Clarice Lispector; and in contemporary writings, such as those of Ana Martins Marques, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, and Leonardo Fróes.
To aid in our chlorophyllic listening, we are joined by important figures in philosophy and cultural criticism. And like a forest, these are just a few literary and theoretical representatives in an infinity of singularities that are not determined and cannot be determined, but are constantly blossoming and being discovered.
Evando Nascimento echoes João Cabral de Melo Neto in stating that "To live/ is to go among what lives." Only by acknowledging that humans are within a complex relational network will new meanings for existence be born. Literature, with its poetics, can be a privileged garden of these meanings, and thus the author offers us a phytoliterature and a phytowriting, as more accurate expressions of what he calls vegetal thought.
Organized into ten essays, "O pensamento vegetal" (Plant Thought) is a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical book that values the flourishing of reflection, words, and imagination. It draws on four main sources: philosophy, literature, the arts, and the "nomadic sciences," which seek to displace some of the dogmas of the positivist tradition. Thus, it proposes new—and urgent—ways of relating to the world.
"
