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Then we are alone in nature because our relation to life has become objectified, notably by naming and integrating all beings into a whole, so that we can no longer be in communion with them. Furthermore, through our way of constructing the world, we have separated all living beings from one another and deprived them of the link(s) between them, that is, of a source of life, which has more to do with breath and touch than with sight and whatever description and reproduction. Hence, our world looks like a sort of museum composed of inanimate things invested with our projections.

— Through Vegetal Being by Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray (Page 85)

We must learn how to look at a tree, not to perceive its present form in order to re-present it mentally and fix it by naming it. Rather, we must gaze at its being as living and changing. Now we designate a birch with the same name in the spring, the summer, the autumn and the winter, although this name refers to forms, colors, and even to sounds and to odors, which are absolutely different according to the time of the year, not to say that of the day. Using the same name to allude to the birch at any time, we remove it from its living presence and deprive ourselves of our sensory perceptions to enter into presence with it. However, is it not the mode of presence that our culture taught us to consider the truth? — a truth that asks us to give up our living perceptions. How could we, then, care about life, ours and that of the world?

— Through Vegetal Being by Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray (Page 49)

In reality, the summer and even the autumn are preferred to the spring in the West, probably because our culture is a masculine one and the stress is put on production, through which man can compete with nature. Instead of celebrating and helping the natural growing and blooming, he endeavors to do better than nature itself thrugh his fabrication (e.g., Aristotle, Physics, B1). He tries to master the natural potential to substitute his own power for that of nature. He thus parlyzes the natural life and production by adapting them to his own plans instead of letting nature grow in accordance with its rhythms and its fecundity. More and more, he strives to intervene in this process, to force nature to produce more and at an accelerated artificial rhythm.

— Through Vegetal Being by Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray (Page 38)

Of course, the real tricksters are the firm believers in the received world of metaphysics. Their signature hoax, responsible for today's dominant worldview, is the act of transubstantiating all forms of life into lifeless property.

— Through Vegetal Being by Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray (Page 124)