Rodrigo Martini
Rodrigo Martini is Lecturer in English at the University of Georgia, USA. He graduated with a BA and MA in Letters and Literary Studies from the São Paulo State University (UNESP – Rio Preto, 2008 and 2010), an MA in English from the University of Louisville (2012), and a PhD in English from Rice University (2019). He works on the intersections of Anglophonic modernism, media thinking, animal studies, and biopolitics. He is co-editor of Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury 2021) with Aaron Jaffe and Michael F. Miller. His work on Vilém Flusser is forthcoming in the Journal of Comparative Literature Studies.
Articles of Rodrigo Martini
Flusser’s Plantonic Philosophy
This essay examines the imagery of trees in Flusser’s works such as Natural:Mind, as well as shorter essays “On the Forest” [Da Floresta] and “Plant Film.” The figure of trees and plants cut across the different facets of Flusser’s corpus: from his employment of Husserlian phenomenology, to his retooling of Heidegger’s metaphysics, to his views on media thinking and the apparatus. Understanding his engagement with the plant world can help us understand his modernist method of thinking and the importance of language as a mediating apparatus for thinking. Together, these ideas about trees offer a unique view into Flusser’s thinking of media as a locus of innovation and resistance – two modernist concerns par excellence.