What do plants want?

Abstract

In a situation where plants are invested with the power of speech, there arises the question, “What do plants want?" In turn, plant horror arises from human beings’ inability to answer this question. Such is the familiar scenario of killer plant narratives in the era of today’s emerging Anthropocene. This chapter examines plant horror, stemming from the phenomenon of talking plants, as represented in The Day of the Triffids (1962), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960, 1986), The Ruins (2008), and The Happening (2008). It formulates its question of what it is that plants want from the “Chè vuoi?" in Jacques Lacan’s account of the “subversion of the subject” in the “dialectic of desire.” All this is done for the sake of staging a new encounter with plants within the vegetal turn of today’s “humanities.”.