Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Abstract This essay rereads George Staunton's two-volume An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797) through the lens of posthuman discourse. The author studies Staunton's descriptions of plants to develop an alternative theory of East-West relations that is not defined by antagonism, romanticization, or even ambivalence, but rather by a form of weak friendship that slips constantly into illegibility. If reading an archive of human interactions allows us to better understand the competing interests and differences in worldviews that undergird political life, attending to human-plant interactions allows us to see how forms and rituals of sociality might in fact create new intimacies that in turn destabilize or dissolve these recognizable forms. Indeed, as the article shows, plants can often function as a form of asemic writing, teaching us to interpret the human gestures and words that occur around them as emotive or opaque rather than as signifiers of meaning.
Li Qi Peh (Sun,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: