Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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Bennett, Jane (2012), "Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency", in Cohen, Jeffrey (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books an imprint of Punctum Books, pp.237–269, ISBN 9780615625355 Bennett invokes Foucault at a number of moments in the book. What I find interesting is that Foucault elucidated the coming into being of the notion of the human as a coherent unit--this was part of the birth of modern discourse. And here we are seeing the idea of the human start to dissolve. It's not the trans-humanism of the technology fetishists (sorry, John Burdett) with the human animal being overtaken by computers, but rather the growing idea that humans aren't a useful unit of analysis. Lebhafte Materie“ ist ein politisch philosophischer Versuch, die Schranken zwischen stumpfer Materie und dynamisch Lebendigen aufzubrechen, um so ein anderes Bewusstsein für Menschen und Umwelt zu schaffen. Bennett schafft es, Theorie und Alltagsbeispiele zusammenzubringen, um so ein wirklich sehr gut lesbares Buch zu gestalten. Das englische Original ist zwar schon 2010 erschienen, doch ist die Thematik heute nicht aktueller denn je? Welche Handlungsmacht geht von einem Virus aus? „Lebhafte Materie“ ist allemal eine Lektüre wert, nicht nur unter dem Aspekt der Umwelt zu Liebe, sondern auch um vielleicht die Welt und ihre Dinge aus einer anderen Perspektive zu betrachten. Vibrant Matter will reward readers by opening many fields of inquiry that require responses. The reconceptualization of the material world that Vibrant Matter represents is a meaningful step in the direction of reformulating many of the debates within environmental philosophy that continue to retain the vestiges of overt dualism and its less obvious manifestation in the subject-object distinction.” — Bryan E. Bannon, Environmental Philosophy

Khan, Gulshan (February 2009). "Agency, nature and emergent properties: an interview with Jane Bennett". Contemporary Political Theory. 8 (1): 90–105. doi: 10.1057/cpt.2008.43. S2CID 144483000. Jane Bennett originally trained in environmental studies and political science. She then went on to Cornell University to study environmental science. After Cornell she studied political theory and gained her degree ( magna cum laude) in 1979 from Siena College, Loudonville, New York. Whilst at Siena College Bennett met Kathy Ferguson. Bennett then went on to the University of Massachusetts and qualified as a doctor of political science in 1986. [7] [8] Philosophical work [ edit ] In failing to suggest both why and how our current societies could feasibly encounter the world in this way, Vibrant Matter inadvertently raises some critical questions about the epistemic community to which its author belongs. Why the hesitation—or it is an inability—to spell-out why a new politics is not only necessary but achievable? By what mechanisms and means can the formidable ‘modern constitution’ described by Latour be torn-up and replaced? Bennett, Jane (2020). Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1478007791.KKL: And there is more to account for – entire landscapes of trash, landfills, industrially driven agriculture, waterways and a further category made up of, for example, geotectonic activities and flooding, or even of hyperobjects like global warming – all with negative attributes or “non-identity”, to use Adorno’s term, and certainly hard to embrace. By way of contrast to Adorno approach you propose a surprising turn towards a positive or reflexive affirmation. Bennett, J. (1994b) Thoreau’s Nature Ethics, Politics, and the Wild. (New York University Press: New York). Revised and reprinted as Bennett, Jane (2015), "Of sympathies alchemical and poetic", Rare Earth, Vienna: Tyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, pp.112–118

Bennett, Jane (2012), "Thing-Power", in Elkins, Jeremy; Norris, Andrew (eds.), Truth and Democracy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.154–158, ISBN 9780812243796 Bennett, Jane (2017), "Vegetal Life and OntoSympathy", in Keller, Catherine; Rubenstein, Mary-Jane (eds.), Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms, Fordham University Press, pp.89–110 Bennett, J. (2004) ‘The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter’ in Political Theory 32, 3: 347–372. How’s it in?” Bennett asked. She turned to me. “Try to pull it out!” I leaned down, grabbed an orange handful, and yanked. It wouldn’t budge. This past fall, I met Bennett at a coffee shop near the Johns Hopkins campus. Sixty-five, with coiffed silver hair and cat’s-eye glasses, she sat at a table near the window reading the Zhuangzi, one of the two most important texts of Taoism, the Chinese school of thought that emphasizes living in harmony with the world. “The coffee isn’t very good here, but the people are nice,” she told me, conspiratorially. She took out her phone. “I have to show you a picture.” She turned the screen toward me, revealing a photo of two dead rats lying on the pavement—an image at odds with her kindly-neighbor looks. “I was walking by the university, and this is what I found,” she said. I leaned closer. The rats, who had drowned in a rainstorm, lay in artful counterpoint, as though posing for a still-life.

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Adorno, T. (1990) Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd: London). Last night I finished Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Now that I sometimes can find the leisure to read a book, Bennett's latest has been at the top of my list ... and once I began the work, I could not put it down. Vibrant Matter is a lucid and compelling account of how materiality, too often considered as an inert substance, can be rethought as a plethora of things that form assemblages of human and nonhuman actors (or actants, to use the term Bennett takes from Bruno Latour). When humans are but one force in a potentially unbounded network of forces, everyday phenomena no longer seem so quotidian (now wonder Bennett's earlier work was on enchantment in everyday life). Power grids, refuse atop a storm drain, stem cells and fatty foods are some of the things she explores as vibrant matter, as a web of objects with agency -- and if this effectivity is at times aleatory, it is seldom negligible and always a challenge to anthropocentricism. She concludes the book with what she calls a "kind of Nicene Creed for would-be materialists" -- and that religious designation is only partly tongue in cheek. Vital materialism is a kind of spiritualism without gods, a way of restoring sacredness to worldliness. The creed: They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. Bennett, Jane (2012), "Stones", in Sæbjörnsson, Egill; Herzogenrath, Bernd (eds.), Stones According to Egill Sæbjörnsson, New York: Revolver Publishing / Continuum, pp.27–36, ISBN 9781441163868