When: Tuesday, 20 May 2025, 18:30 - 20:00
Where: Konferenzraum, Department of Political Science, NIG, 2nd floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna
Speaker: Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin)
Moderation: Firoozeh Farvardin (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
Abstract
In a time of intertwined ecological and political crises, revisiting the ecological dimensions of anti-capitalist thought offers important insights into resistance and care. Rosa Luxemburg argued that “only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organizations makes accumulation of capital possible” and saw this process as deeply intertwined with state violence locally and imperialism globally, noting that the state enables and supports capitalist domination over subsistence economies by imposing new structures of ownership and dispossession. Such incursions into established practices invariably prompt resistance on the part of the people whose lives they are set to upend, which, in turn, is met with more state violence. Yet resistance is not made up exclusively of heroic, spectacular gestures; it also manifests through more commonplace forms (Scott, 1985), including care for the land, and care for human and nonhuman species that inhabit it. In this talk, I look closely at Luxemburg’s herbarium and gardening practices, proposing we consider them as manifestations of plant companionship, a term I use (Lisiak, 2024) to describe the practice of noticing plant life and acknowledging it for what it is, caring for and about it, protecting and defending it, and remaining humbly open to what we do not (yet) know about it. Inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s ‘arts of noticing,’ I comb through Luxemburg’s botanical notebooks, letters, and political and economic writings to reveal the ongoing relevance of her political ecology. This uncovers Luxemburg’s extended understanding of companionship – or comradeship – in struggles for justice, one that includes caring relations with the nonhuman world. Such a reading of Luxemburg’s work opens up the interlaced genealogies of two most pressing causes of our time – human liberation and earth liberation – and expands their geographical horizons. To further tease out the resistance dimension of plant companionship, I turn to contemporary artist-researchers who have been engaging with plants in formally inventive, careful, and participatory ways: Milena Bonilla, Marwa Arsanios, and Jumana Manna.
