The talk will address the idea of the soul as it is presented in the philosophical tradition since antiquity, particularly to the traditional division, introduced by Plato and Aristotle, about the three parts or three kinds of the soul: plant, animal, and human. In the history of philosophy, this division persists through centuries, and every philosopher makes emphasis on some particular elements of it in order to conceptualise the human exception, but there is more than that. Thus, Marx, uses the term “species-being” to define a universal character of human activity. I will mostly talk, however, not about humans, but about the basic element of this construction, the plant, with the aim to demonstrate its own intrinsic universality, which makes possible to talk about the human plant.

OXANA TIMOFEEVA is Sc.D., professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, leading researcher at Tyumen State University, member of the artistic collective “Chto Delat” (“What is to be done”), deputy editor of the journal Stasis, and the author of books History of Animals (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012; trans. into Russian, Turkish, Slovenian, and Persian), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009), How to Love a Homeland (Moscow, syg.ma, 2020; Cairo: Kayfa ta, 2020; trans. into Arabic), Solar Politics (forthcoming), and other writings.