The Environment Forum with Ranjan Ghosh: Plastic Nature

What kind of a negotiation and home has nature built with plastic, a material that is a travelling and transformative genius? In a neo-materialist and an interobjective presence, plastic and nature have built a deeply entangled relationship – the problematic connection between the nature of plastic with what Ranjan Ghosh calls “plastic nature”. Within the material democracy of plastic, nature has been the object of change, but hasn’t nature through its own rounds of plasticity changed the way we see nature today? Hasn’t nature changed itself and plasticized plastic in ways that are startling and unique? The subject-object position has undergone massive revision as also the philosophy of seeing a material and nature. What, then, is this plastic nature?

Ranjan Ghosh is known for his work on the inbetweenness of disciplines for many years now, bringing his “trans” theory (which he calls “trans(in)fusion approach”) to bear on his wide-ranging scholarly work that spans across the fields of comparative literature, comparative philosophy, the philosophy of education, environmental humanities, critical and cultural theory, and intellectual history. His books include the widely discussed Thinking Literature across Continents (2016, with J Hillis Miller), the duology in Transcultural Poetics (2017) & Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking (2020), Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives (ed., 2019), Plastic Tagore (2024), and the trilogy that he is completing to establish the discipline of plastic humanities: The Plastic Turn (2022), Plastic Figures (2025, forthcoming) and Plastic Humanities (forthcoming). Ghosh is Professor at the Department of English, University of North Bengal in India. Learn more about his work at www.ranjanghosh.in.