Emanuele Coccia

Emanuele Coccia teaches philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. The Life of Plants, which Dylan J. Montanari translated for Polity in 2018 from the French of two years before, argues that philosophy has treated plants as scenery and so has the order of things backwards. Plants make the atmosphere every other living thing breathes, which puts them not among the passengers of the world but among its conditions, and Coccia works through leaf, root and flower as three ways of being mixed into everything else. It is a short book carrying a very large claim, and it reads more like an essay than a treatise.