1   How like a (Fig) Leaf Man would be the only one to have invented a garment to cover his sex. He would be a man only to the extent that he was able to be naked...1 Jacques Derrida How unlike a book title. How unrecognisable in the humanities in the year 2000 (the date that Donna Haraway’s book-length interview How like a leaf was published).2 The initial invocation of metaphor grants only brief comfort – how like. We are uncertain of the subject of the comparison. Is Haraway herself ‘like a leaf’? Is the interview form, is the printed page? What could such an open-ended comparison convey? This beginning, with this figure from this thinker, one with a PhD in Biology, inspires me regarding possible paths of thought that may well generate differences but do not police an absolute divide between the humanities and the sciences, as much as my training in the former renders these paths hard graft. It also speaks to Haraway’s refusal to endorse what she names a Western ethnocentric mode of thought that would separate nature from culture, as if that were possible. On the side of curiosity and on the side of play, she entreats us to view: Biology [as] an inexhaustible source of troping. It is certainly full of metaphor, but it is more than metaphor… biology is not merely a metaphor that illuminates something else, but an inexhaustible source of getting at the non-literalness of the world.3 Her repeated use of ‘inexhaustible’ suggests the fallibility of taxonomies of speciated difference as it is classically thought, and speaks to a reciprocity with what Jacques Derrida calls limitrophy, or an understanding of difference as that which grows. Growth, cultivation, and the work of figuration: there is a graft here, for me, between the work of Haraway and Derrida and also between academic attention and horticultural practice. Haraway explicitly cautions us against the invocation of gardens. Gardens, she notes, tend to revert to the Garden, recalling Nature to a state of innocence and the requirement that she must be saved, fenced off, guarded, or is already guarded, fenced off or saved by an impenetrable veil or symbolic bar.4 Countering the metaphysics of Nature as guarded Garden, Haraway insists on a creative interleaving of tropos and topos, figure and place.This is a geotropism, she says, muddying the dominant figure in the history of rhetoric that is the sun and its supposedly all-pervasive command of a heliotropology.5 This geotropism is a general condition, not one into which we have Fallen nor one from which we must or could transcend. Oversight Haraway’s regular enthusiasm for the mud, and for our always non-innocent entanglements with the world notwithstanding, botantists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler recently diagnosed the human tendency towards privileging what is within 0 and 15% below their field of vision as ‘plant blindness’.6 So much for the overblown register of vision in so very many narratives of the human!7 Narratives accounting for the evolution of Homo Sapiens and the individual subject formation of human beings are famously magnetised by visual figures. To index but two examples: in the wider species case, Sigmund Freud accounted for the emergence of human bipedalism as intrinsically bound up with the privilege of sight, notably over and 2   above smell with its fecund fascination with our animal organs of excretion and reproduction.8 In the narrower case, Jacques Lacan sketched a mirror phase that would provide a visual anchor, a bounded self-image, for the sensations otherwise exceeding what would become the human subject.9 In psychoanalytic accounts, however, the field of vision is neither all-seeing nor circumscribed technically by a few degrees, rather it is psychically filtered by projection, foreclosure, displacement and other defensive mechanisms to avoid seeing the difference of the sexual other. I name these old problems – that persistently live on, because they may yet be part of the same story, even though they do not appear to address the vegetal, at least at first blush. Something of the unease that Derrida felt before his cat, one morning, in that infamous bathroom scene, afflicts me now, navigating a space and a time that is shot through with histories that seek to determine and wholly delimit such encounters. But the elemental academic frameworks of discipline, method, archive, subjects and objects are suffering a dehiscence, at least they are if we are to take deconstruction seriously. The invitation to speak to the topic of ‘plant blindness’ appealed to the poetic graft of the pleasure of cultivating new thought, alongside a certain concern regarding what might come to light in the autobiography or autopsychobiography or autobotanicography of what may be parsed through the practice of gardening in my life. In the sudden and recent proliferation of humanities scholars turning their attention to the vegetal, Derrida is frequently invoked. This is for several reasons. One is simply in acknowledgement of the profound energy that his posthumous book, The Animal that Therefore I Am has catalysed in what is called, for want of a better name, Animal Studies. There is, perhaps, a kind of wish for the same kind of boost to the growth of ‘Plant Studies’ (which again I am naming only provisionally). Sometimes this manifests as a rebuke to Derrida for putting off plants in the second volume of his seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign (Jeffrey Nealon’s Plant Theory quotes him to that effect10). Sometimes it shows up as a hermeneutic device to explore the question of what might have happened had the encounter between Derrida and his cat, concerned the possibility of a vegetal rather than feline primary mirror (as in the work of Giovanni Aloi11). Part of the path that I am setting out upon here will also involve another return to The Animal in light of the wider project of deconstruction. While it remains the case that many Animal Studies scholars are producing illuminating work that may well concentrate on particular animals or focus on particular cases of injustice against particular animals, the decisive contribution of Derrida dilates around his insight that The “question of animality” is not one question among others […] it also represents the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined, […] all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is “proper to man,” the essence and future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, “human rights,” “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” etc.12 This does not mean that animals are the most important beings to consider: Derrida’s work is not a politics of representation nor one of equality or symmetry that would aim at adequately accommodating all living beings in the picture (with each in their rightful place). Rather, it is to interrogate the way that the pernicious concept of the animal as that which is supposedly discrete from the human divides up life, up to and including those who may be put to death. ‘The concept’ here indexes the Western 3   metaphysical imaginary in general, but the specular dialectical tradition that raises man above nature in particular and substantially contributes to the concept of the subject before the law. The laws formed by that imaginary barely consider vegetal lives as such at all – and where they do, it tends to fall under localised property law: it is indigenous and other eco-activists that are insisting that law should imagine natural environments, rivers say, as persons with rights rather than belonging to persons or nations with rights, or that ecocide should be legally established as a criminal, thus punishable, offence; my path here will not consist of adding plants in to existing juridical structures (as urgent as that is, given the catastrophe of continued climate change denial).13 If there is a ‘plant question’ it will be extensive and it will continue the work of ‘soliciting’ the concepts on which we have relied, consciously or unconsciously (soliciting in the sense that Derrida etymologically unpacks, as a shaking to the core).14 As with so very many other readers of The Animal that Therefore I Am, that famous bathroom scene has caught my attention.15 This is not just because of the novelty of the philosopher and a cat, nor just that philosophy and the everyday coincide in a scene in order to speak critically of subjectivity in light of our shameful conceptual inheritance that bars the homogenised mass of non-human animals from all the powers believed to be possessed by the subject that calls himself ‘Man’. But, magnified against the context of whether or not plants can be seen as such, it is the way that nudity – or its constitutive impossibility – is disseminated across the whole essay from the desire conditionally expressed in the opening sentence, namely that Derrida ‘In the beginning,’ ‘would like to entrust’ himself before his audience with ‘naked words’.16 Breaking that opening sentence was the easy to overlook clause: ‘were it possible’. Following the traces of Derrida’s marked use of the conditional – I would… were it possible – allows his cultivation of difference vis-à-vis our violent conceptual heritage to take root. This fragile guide is especially necessary given his unorthodox presentation of ‘argument,’ which is achieved as much at the level of style as it is by more evident exegesis. It can also ameliorate the difficulty for readers in recognising the shared ground between the more obvious dogma maintained by the concept of ‘the animal’ (such as ‘the animal cannot mourn’) and what may initially appear descriptive – ‘the animal is not nude’. Thus, when Derrida puts all the supposed capacities belonging to man into question – and he names ‘speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, etc’ – they are specifically put into question in so far as they are identified with autonomous capacity.17 Hence, he troubles the opposition of Man’s professed ability to speak, etc, versus the animal’s alleged privation of speech. The ability to dress oneself, the ability to be nude (assuming a self-consciousness, an embarrassment and a shame), are thus roped into conceptual coincidence with the autonomous ambition of Man, but no matter how counter-intuitively, Derrida implies something very different. I’ll come to his implications, which regard the living in general, not just Man and not just nonhuman animals, in a few moments. While most of the vast amount of critical writing on Derrida’s encounter with his cat has focused on his endorsement of the notion that an animal might gaze back at or respond to a human (rather than simply remain as the object of a gaze in thrall to instinctive reactions alone) one portentous aspect – briefly addressed as such in the essay – has garnered comparatively little interest. Drawing on his unease, his shame 4   before his cat, Derrida remarks that ‘We would […] have to think shame and technology together, as the same ‘subject’.’18 Yes, there is another ‘would’. It is planted in a garden: the Garden. Starting with an ‘In the beginning’ and desiring ‘naked words’, the ludicrously time-travelling answer that Derrida’s text gives to the question of how far can one plant take you is to the origin of time. This is not to summon Stephen Hawking. Rather, it is to indict the Judaeo-Christian ontotheological story of history. It is to disperse the origin tale that Genesis consecrates, implanting sin within autobiography and positioning vegetation as that which is available to be appropriated in the single gesture of seeking cover behind the leaves of a Fig. That theological fiat was doubled by Freud when he positioned woman’s sole invention as that of weaving cloth in mimetic memory of the cover-up performed by her own ‘bush.’19 Yet even a sophisticated thinker, and indeed the translator of The Animal that Therefore I Am, David Wills, hedges his bets when writing of the seizure of the fig leaf as an affirmation that shame and technology are as one, a ‘blushing machine’ as he says.20 He is certainly aware that this seizure, this sublation, this overcoming of nature in order to forge clothing, with clothing then standing for Man’s technological grasp upon the world, is that of dialectics (the macro idealism that Derrida condemns as inadequate in itself and continuing to license an ethical horror show of ever-greater proportions). But in expanding ‘shame and technology’ to include at least some nonhuman animals (those that mate), Wills drops critical attention to both sexual difference and the Garden in which shame and technology are ostensibly bedded. He lets fall the nuance that Derrida’s conditional ‘woulds’ have nurtured regarding the muddying of the naked truth and the scattering of any notion of an original sin. Out of the seeming obviousness of clothing as a distinctively human technology motivated by the dialectical overcoming of weakness (the weakness of nudity welded to sin) – versus the seeming obviousness of the absence of clothing as such on other species authorised by their alleged perfect adaptation to an allegedly ahistorical nature, Derrida refashions the stakes. 'Clothing' becomes a particular instance of a wider condition. This wider condition is that of hiding.21 Hiding is a general condition, clothing and shame become demoted to particular instances. And even that gesture of withdrawal – hiding – can never be complete: this is not an alternative between absence or presence. We are none of us revealed in the naked truth of presence, none of ‘us’ at all. There is no reason to think that once the conceptual divide between ‘man’ and ‘the animal’ is dismantled, the onto-theological Garden dug over, and the differences between living things welcomed as a site of growth, that this would not also affect vegetal lives. Vegetal lives in general – and not just the Fig Tree that a certain guerrilla gardener hid amongst less showy shrubs in urban South London as protection from the lively human ‘wildlife’ – are also partly revealed, partly concealed, never fully present. While it is the case that Derrida does not devote such lengthy attention to plants as he does to animals, his earliest writings radically extend ‘auto-affection’ as an inherently open structure of relation to self to ‘[a]ll living things’.22 To expose at least something of both Derrida’s possible vegetal encounters and the ways in which sexual differences might also be cultivated rather than shamed, I will turn briefly to Michael Marder, Elaine Miller and Luce Irigaray. 5   Tree surgery Marder reconstructs a scene of reflection with regard to vegetation in the second book of his recent plant trilogy, The Philosopher’s Plant.23 The volume’s twelve seductive chapters each explore a philosopher and ‘their’ plant. Yet in his zeal to propagate plants within our philosophical and ethical attention, even Marder can underinvestigate the figures he suggests have escaped attention hitherto. In the case of ‘Derrida’s Sunflowers,’ Marder prefaces his discussion with Derrida’s reminiscences of his early life in Algeria (reminiscences channeled by the invitation to write something reflecting upon the existentialist journal Les Temps Modernes).24 In the book of ‘Plato’s Plane Tree,’ ‘Irigaray’s Waterlily’ and ‘Derrida’s Sunflowers’, Marder remains oddly uninterested in Jean Paul Sartre’s Chestnut Tree. For the teenage Derrida, Marder notes, allowed himself to pause from reading the novel in his hands to be luxuriantly caught up in the ‘lush vegetation’ that surrounds him in La Ferrière Square in Algiers.25 Emphasising that this reading scene is ‘full of mirrors’ between times, places and modes of philosophy, Marder informs us incidentally that the novel dilating Derrida’s attention was Sartre’s Nausea. Yet Marder disregards the vegetal encounter marking that very text (an encounter that critics refer to as a metonymy for the entire novel).26 Sartre’s encounter, even as it spurred the disorienting Nausea of the novel’s title, is blindsided. The distance that Algeria’s vegetation implants in Derrida, and the difference in affect gleaned from his text, becomes all the more mysterious since Marder denudes it of all contrast with Sartre’s disturbance by the chestnut tree. Instead, he truncates Derrida’s contemplation for a generalised and rather formalised figure of differance acting as the pretext for his misguided accusation that Derrida is only interested in the ‘flowers of rhetoric’.27 Ironically this is the very accusation that Derrida levers at Sartre’s work on Saint Genet elsewhere.28 6   Can it simply be that verdant surroundings dispel readerly concentration? Well they can do so, of course. In the spirit, apparently, of mirroring Derrida and Sartre, Marder tells us that the latter also ‘looks up to plants’, but he prunes out the sickness, the existential nausea in this literary archive prompted by the very roots of what Randy Laist refers to as ‘the most famous tree in all existential philosophy’ – Sartre’s Chestnut.29 It’s fame is such that a Chestnut tree dominates the cover of a recent collection of criticism – Sartre’s Nausea: Text, Context, Intertext – even as its mere five references to the tree all orient it as the metonymy of the experience of nausea before a meaningless world.30 Laist, writing in the context of ‘plant horror narratives’, claims Nausea as exactly that, suggesting that the pernicious presence of this Chestnut tree ranged beyond existentialism as such and fed the creeping vegetal horror expressed in such films as the Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956] and The Day of the Triffids [1962]. Brief though Derrida’s recollection of vegetation may be within this essay, it neither devolves into a generic idea of differance nor does the recollection layer any negative affect between the two authors. Of Nausea, he wrote: …this great fiction (that I still admire and that I remember having read in a certain ecstatic bedazzlement at seventeen, in Algiers, in philosophy class, sitting on a bench in La Ferrière Square, sometimes raising my eyes towards the roots, the bushes of flowers or the luxuriant plants, as if to verify the toomuch of existence… how to write like that, and above all, not like that?)31 It is not at all ‘counterintuitive’ that Derrida should raise his eyes to the roots, as Marder suggests, given the staggered, terraced, planting that organises the sloping descent of La Ferrière Square.32 That Derrida names the roots is effectively to cite Sartre: naming the possibility of the world as ‘too much’ is a citation, or a graft of Sartre’s existential horror in a Parisian park into what was then French Algeria only to hold that horror at bay. Sartre’s contrasting vision is described as follows: 7   All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen... The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping over, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty lump, entirely raw, frightening me. Then I had this vision. […] the root, the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder — naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness.33 Transplanting these roots, Derrida wonders how he will and will not write like that: the transplantation does not clone. Given that Sartre’s anti-hero, Roquentin, is overwhelmed by the tree roots, become ‘monstrous lumps’ finally described as ‘naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness,’ and altogether ‘too much,’ perhaps Derrida’s subsequent scene with the little cat is a lesson in how not to write like Sartre. While Derrida’s feels unease – malaise, before his cat, this is not a mortal recoil at the incoherence of existence without anthropological anchor. Rather it is that which dismantles the conceptual inheritance that would keep the feline forever the same, closed within its category, supine before the sole source of meaning that is the erect human. Derrida’s experience does not flatline into equivalence or meaninglessness or boredom as it does for Roquentin, even when the garden ‘smiles’ at him.34 How like a flower There are only scattered references to plants in the work of Luce Irigaray. However, with the encouragement of Marder and, importantly, the work of Elaine Miller in foregrounding ‘efflorescence’ in Irigaray, insight into vegetal being may yet be gleaned. Given Irigaray’s style, which often invokes Western philosophical traditions only to give quite other emphases to their key terms, a ‘method’ that puts her close to Derrida, this is not surprising. Vegetal figures crop up affirmatively and processually across Derrida’s work, the grafting of contexts, the dehiscence of concepts and the dissemination of any seed. While he insists affirmatively that sexual and animal differences traverse the same horizon,35 it is Irigaray that explicitly revises the identification of women with plants as it has been dug in by philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel. Joined under the concept ‘passivity,’ this union classically serves as the dumping ground for the negatives, all the privations that the subject that calls himself man fears to find in himself. Irigaray does not counter this history by arguing for equality through claiming that women too must uproot from the imagined stasis of natural origins and pull themselves erect into fellow dynamic political actors. Rather, she writes, woman’s so-called passivity would not […] be part of an active/passive pair of opposites but would signify a different economy, a different relation to nature […] A matter, therefore, not of pure receptivity but of a movement of growth that never estranges itself from corporeal existence in a natural milieu.36 8   Irigaray thus works to transmute feminine sexual difference with the vegetal such that there would be overlap between, say the auto-affective gesture of at least two lips in contact blurring inside and outside, blurring visible and invisible, sight and touch, conceptual and sensible, with the auto-affective gesture of, say, tulips, blurring sight and touch, conceptual and sensible, vegetation and the flesh as well as – to pressure Irigaray – what has been called masculine and feminine. Rather than an agony of shame in the grip of an onto-theological concept, an opening emerges that cultivates sexual differences that are neither anthropocentric nor zoo-centric nor phyto-centric, neither wholly clothed in metaphor, nor wholly revealed in their naked truth. Bibliography Allen, William (2003) ‘Plant Blindness’ in Bioscience, 53.10 p.926. Accessed online 7 July 2019: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/926/254897 Aloi, Giovanni (2019) ‘Presence, Bareness, and Being-with’ in Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (Leiden: Brill Rodopi) pp. 183-90. Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Derrida, Jacques (1978) ‘Force and Signification’ in Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) pp.3-30. Derrida, Jacques (1982) ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press) pp. 207-72. Derrida, Jacques, (1986) Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Nebraska University Press) Derrida, Jacques (2002) “Dead Man Running:” Salut, Salut. Notes for a Letter to ‘Les Temps Modernes’’ in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001 (Stanford University Press) pp. 257-292. 9   Derrida, Jacques (2004) ‘Violence Against Animals’ in Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press) pp. 62-76. Derrida, Jacques (2008) The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press). Finlayson, Chris (16 March 2017) ‘New Zealand River Granted Same Legal Rights as Human Being’, The Guardian, online, accessed 7 July 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted- samelegal-rights-as-human-being Freud, Sigmund (1991) ‘Femininity [1933] in the Penguin Freud Library V.2 Civilization, Society & Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin) pp. 145-69. Freud, Sigmund (1991) ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ [1929] in the Penguin Freud Library V.12 Civilization, Society & Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin) pp. 243-340. Haraway, Donna J. (2000) How like a leaf: an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve/Donna J. Haraway (New York and London: Routledge). Haraway, Donna J. (2008) ‘Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics, Local Terms’ in Material Feminisms, eds. Alaimo, Stacy & Susan Hekman (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press) pp.157-187. Jay, Martin (1994) Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press). Lacan, Jacques (2006) ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company) pp.75-81. Laist, Randy (2016) ‘Sartre and the Roots of Plant Horror’ in Plant Horror: approaches to the monstrous vegetal in fiction and film, (Basingstoke: Palgrave) pp. 163-78. Michael Marder (2014) The Philosopher’s Plant (Columbia University Press). Miller, Elaine (2002) The Vegetative Soul: from Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (State University of New York Press). Nealon, Jeffrey T. (2016) Plant Theory Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford University Press). Sartre, Jean Paul (1938) Nausea, accessed online 07 July 2019 http://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm Turner, Lynn (2010) ‘When Species Kiss: some recent correspondence between animots’ in Humanimalia, 2.1, pp. 60-85. Wills, David (2016) ‘The Blushing Machine: Derrida’ in Inanimation: theories of inorganic life (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press) pp. 81-110.                                                                                                                 1  Derrida, Jacques (2008) The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press) p.5, emphasis added. The opening eponymous essay was first published in English translation in 2002.   2 Haraway, Donna J. (2000) How like a leaf: an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve/Donna J. Haraway (New York and London: Routledge). 3 Haraway (2000) p. 82. 4 See Haraway, Donna J. (2008) ‘Otherworldly Conversations: Terran Topics, Local Terms’ in Material Feminisms, eds. Alaimo, Stacy & Susan Hekman (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press) pp.157-187. 10                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               5 Jacques Derrida discusses the problem of heliotropology in his (1982) ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press) pp. 207-72. 6 See Allen, William (2003) ‘Plant Blindness’ in Bioscience, 53.10 p.926. Accessed online 7 July 2019: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/926/254897 7 Martin Jay accounts for this sensory privilege and philosophical resistance to it in his 1994 volume Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press). 8 Freud, Sigmund (1991) ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ [1929] in the Penguin Freud Library V.12 Civilization, Society & Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin) p. 289, n.1. 9 Lacan, Jacques (2006) ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company) pp.75-81. 10 Nealon, Jeffrey T. (2016) Plant Theory Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford University Press) p.51. 11 Aloi, Giovanni (2019) ‘Presence, Bareness, and Being-with’ in Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (Leiden: Brill Rodopi) pp.186-7. 12 Derrida, Jacques (2004) ‘Violence Against Animals’ in Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press) pp. 62-3. 13. See Finlayson, Chris (16 March 2017) ‘New Zealand River Granted Same Legal Rights as Human Being’, The Guardian, available online, accessed 7 July 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealandriver-granted- same-legal-rights-as-human-being>. 14 See Derrida, Jacques (1978) ‘Force and Signification’ in Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). 15 I first addressed this in my 2010 article ‘When Species Kiss: some recent correspondence between animots’ in Humanimalia, 2.1, pp. 60-85. 16 Derrida, 2008, p.1. 17 Ibid, p.5. 18 Ibid. 19 Freud, Sigmund (1991) ‘Femininity [1933] in the Penguin Freud Library V.2 Civilization, Society & Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin) p.164. 20 See Wills, David (2016) ‘The Blushing Machine: Derrida’ in Inanimation: theories of inorganic life (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press). I thank Astrid Schrader for valuable feminist conversations on our reading of Derrida and Wills. 21 See Derrida, 2008, p. 61. 22 This autoaffection is always and already a heteroaffection. See Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) p.165. 23 Michael Marder (2014) The Philosopher’s Plant (Columbia University Press). 24 See Derrida, Jacques (2002) “Dead Man Running:” Salut, Salut. Notes for a Letter to ‘Les Temps Modernes’’ in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001 (Stanford University Press) pp. 257-292. His letter is dated 1996. 25 Marder (2014) p.194 11                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               26 See Rolls, Alistair and Elizabeth Rchniewski, cited in Laist, Randy (2016) ‘Sartre and the Roots of Plant Horror’ in Plant Horror: approaches to the monstrous vegetal in fiction and film, (Basingstoke: Palgrave) p. 164. 27  Marder (2014) p. 197.   28  See  Derrida, Jacques, (1986) Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Nebraska University Press) p.13b: ‘In Saint Genet, the question of the flower, the anthological question, is, among others, infallibly avoided.’ The reference is to Sartre’s biography of Jean Genet.   29 Laist, ‘Sartre and the Roots of Plant Horror’ in Plant Horror, p. 164. 30 Alistair Rolls and Elizabeth Rchniewski, eds. (2006) Sartre’s Nausea: Text, Context, Intertext (Leiden: Brill). 31 Derrida (2002) p.164. 32 Marder (2014) p. 194. 33 Sartre, Jean Paul (1938) Nausea, accessed online 07 July 2019 http://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm 34 ‘Once at the gate I turned back. Then the garden smiled at me. I leaned against the gate and watched for a long time. The smile of the trees, of the laurel, meant something; that was the real secret of existence […] I felt with boredom that I had no way of understanding.’ Sartre, qtd in Laist, p. 176. 35 Derrida (2008) p. 36. 36 Irigaray, Luce qtd in Miller, Elaine (2002) The Vegetative Soul: from Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (State University of New York Press) p.190.