If we ask further what lies beyond the strict material positionality of an object, what the object may have been affectively invested with – in a sense, this is to acknowledge that vegetality may be defined as more than simply not being able to think, but a failure of lifeliness, of ability to act upon others – we find something like animacy. The question then becomes: Who are the proper mediums of affect? Are they humans? Humans and animals? Vegetables? Or inanimate entities, such as the incorporeal blend or a “dead” but warming and comforting piece of furniture?

“I just don’t want to be a vegetable,” while seemingly an imaginative fancy, also informs, microcosmically and iteratively, of what proper humanity resembles – nonvegetables - and, further, that humans could in some way become vegetables. Further, it describes what discredited human subjects are like: vegetables. Indeed, vegetables, believed to be living, are not at the bottom of the animacy hierarchy, as stones seem to be; for instance, when humans and nonhumans eat them, they have specific effects and can be either nourishing or toxic to bodily systems. As Jane Bennett cogently notes, food itself is an “actant.” Using a term like persistent vegetative state potentially, again microcosmically, informs us of how we should understand vegetables themselves: vegetables cannot think; they are passive; they merely survive; they are dependent, not freestanding plants, but partaking of plants’ nutrients. In this way, the “vegetality” (constructed between the medicalized language of “persistent vegetative state” and the lay expression “she’s a vegetable”) of Terri Schiavo, whose non-speaking body became the subject of contentious national, legal, and interfamilial debate for seven years, culminating in the court-ordered removal of her feeding tube in 2005, became a politicized linguistic event as well as a politicized discussion of life and death. Indeed, Lennard Davis has pointed out that had Terri Schiavo been considered a “severely disabled woman” rather than a “vegetable,” different politics – even different legal consequences – would have ensued. As many scholars and activists have made clear, disability politics is a consistently unacknowledged and erased partner to right-to-die bioethical considerations; everyone loses by not thinking deeply enough about their underlying connections.