The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness

by Michael Marder, Anaïs Tondeur (Artwork)

We entrust readers with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images--one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and the self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable as it is, we insist on the need to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize it, taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.

In this beautiful book, Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur reflect deeply on the hyperobject that is the nuclear radiation from Chernobyl through the device of the herbarium, miniature ecosystems that botanists used in the Victorian period. Under the fragile traveling glass of paper and pixels, Marder and Tondeur host tendrils of prose and cellulose. It’s a stroke of genius to have miniaturized something so vast and demonic—we don’t even know how to dream any of this yet (it’s called ecological awareness), and as Marder observes here, just upgrading our aesthetics to cope with the trauma of this awareness is a key unfinished project. – Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

78 pages, PDF

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. An author of seven books and over 100 articles, he is a specialist in phenomenology, political thought, and environmental philosophy.

Reviews

[Osore Misanthrope · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Опасно наивна идеја напретка” довела нас је у тачку без повратка, где су непријатељи наш невидљиви изопачени изрод – зрачење, микропластика, отровчине… Леталне компоненте лете и изван Зоне отуђења, корелатива Замјатиновог Зеленог зида, јер двоножац без крила је одприрођен: посрнуо, искљуцан и окован, извршио је “трансфер суверенитета на атом”, успоставио “режим тишине” у коме бива биоскулптурисан, мутиран, делетиран.

Фотограми, настали стављањем чернобиљских биљака на фотосензитивни папир који светлост потамњује, остављајући обрисе биљних делова као израчене одблеске, опомињу и застрашују, оличавају крхкост, али и пластичност вегетативног. Обезљуђена планета је неминовност; тренутак у коме нема овако прозаичних реченичних сплачина – ни филозофских, ни уметничких, ни у мисли, ни у стилу – јесте спасоносан. Треба надживети осам милијарди будала.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a book. Everyone should read it. It has changed my views on plants and the way we process (or don't process at all) events and disasters. Also, this book hits different during a pandemic, too...

We don't control our lives at all, do we? And yet I wish we made healthier choices.

My favourite quote:

plants teach us that there is no infinite growth, no growth without decay, itself the precondition for future growth.

I want to try and read some other books by Michael Marder.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting and has some very thought provoking considerations of temporality, technology and disaster, but tends to revert to the (disappointing) big ‘we’ of humanity and human nature, and uses tediously high-philosophical language at times

[Callum Morris-Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a challenging read, academically rigorous, but fascinating in how the author and artist (in their philosophy-art collaboration of literary ‘fragments’ and corresponding photograms of radioactive plants) craft a herbarium that considers Chernobyl, the exploded consciousness it caused, and how the event requires us to be more like plants in response to the analogous effects of climate change we face.

[Margarete Maneker · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Chernobyl disaster is a mugwort disaster—not, to be sure, of the mugwort itself, but of our relation to it and, through it, to vegetal nature as, at once, a part and a condensed representation of nature as a whole."

wow!!!! loved this, really lovely introduction to Marder's work, which so aligns with my own interests. accessible, interesting philosophy about the bodymind and the vegetal kingdom <3333

[Francisco Becerra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of photograms of Chernobyl’s radioactive flora, with thought-provoking snippets about mortality, endings, the clashes between technology and nature, transformation and isolation. Some of them could benefit for an extensive dialogue with nuclear engineering, with what can be done do get things right, and not just mourn the disaster. Still, this is a very profound reflection about technology going wrong and its myriad repercussions.

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard a lot about this text and was excited to have a reason to read it as part of my field exams. I liked the format and the way Marder mixes the personal/autofictional with the nonfictional/lightly theoretical. This is also a text that was much more personal than I expected it to be because of the subject matter and my cultural background.

[saizine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating little book ruminating on the effects of Chernobyl on the natural environment. The images/photography are particularly resonant, as well as Fragments 6 (“One is ineluctably passive in the face of radioactivity”), 9 (“Besides the plants that have grown in radioactive soil, the shards of our own exploded consciousness are reassembled in it, albeit not glued together—neither mended nor healed”), 11 (“voices and words (whispered or screamed out)”), 13 (“’It strokes the surfaces of things… consoling them, patting them, offering gentle contact, caress. It is possible to be touched without a modicum of sentimentality”), 20 (“Humanity has been digging its own grave for quite a long time… Radiation and the techno-madness it metonymizes eat our flesh, eat into it. But there is more to it: the Sarcophagus is a Psychophagus, soul-eating”), 24 (“Plants will gently gag the silent scream of things”), and 27 (“We live after the end of the world. Or, more accurately, after an end of the world… The world has handed, is ending in innumerable ways, and will keep ending for some time to come”). Definitely makes you think and engage beyond the standard reaction to nuclear disaster.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliantly constructed considerations through art and philosophy on the meaning of Chernobyl (as a place, as a disaster) with a perfectly weighted balance between theory and personal experience. The featured artworks (scans of plant-life from Chernobyl) are haunting and abrupt as bridges between each of the 'fragments' (or chapters).