ABSTRACT
The concepts with which we think, are formed, or have form. They are the body of thought, or thought’s body. As bodies, concepts are inherited, undergo morphogenesis, and in turn, give rise to a patterned being-of-thought. The human animal body is strongly marked by bilaterality (left-right); our thinking and concepts strongly exhibit this same pattern: the current human normative conceptual system is dominated by binaries. Our becoming-ethical requires a different way of being and thinking than the left-right, either-or, pattern. To discover such a way of being we can study vegetal existence, and connect this study directly with the Deleuzian concept of ‘becoming-plant’, a concept flagged in A Thousand Plateaus as a site for, and unique expression of ethical life. Drawing on current scientific literature on the molecular basis of plant architecture and plant phylogenetic development, this chapter shows how the development of formal symmetries in plant cells, bodies and parts runs through a different sequence of patterning steps than we see in the development of animal bodies and parts, most notably differences in the timing and distribution of bilaterality in the whole. One fruitful aspect of becoming-plant which our normative thinking and being can learn from is the capacity to form a non-disjunctive bodily nature.
