Thinking-with Gardens: Ploughing the Exclusionary Grounds of ‘the Human’

Abstract

This thesis examines how gardens – both as material and imaginary spaces – are interrelated with the philosophical and historical configuration of ‘the human’, and how ‘thinking-with gardens’ can shed light on the exclusionary mechanisms inherent to the constitution of this human. Following Sylvia Wynter’s philosophy that discloses how ‘the human’ is not a noun but a praxis, the thesis guides the reader on a journey through three gardens, from the garden of Eden, through the botanical garden, to the domestic garden, to trace the constitution of different formulations of ‘being human’. Gardens, in this context, are not understood as Edenic utopias but as ambivalent border spaces in which oppositions meet and collide, and that actively co-constitute human, social, and ecological landscapes.