It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.
 As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.

Politics & Social Sciences

Bennett, Jane

Philosophy

Princeton University Press

Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Modernity and Political Thought)

Politics & Government

Sage Publications, Inc.

Inserting a nineteent century thinker into the intellectual debates of the late twentieth century, Jane Bennett enters Thoreau into a series of dialogues with recent contemporary thinkers: Foucault on the question of identity and power; Donna Haraway on nature and culture; Hollywood celebrities on the Walden Woods project on the environment; the National Endowment for the Humanities and others regarding the relation between politics and arts; and Kafka on the question of political idealism. Bennett suggests that many dimensions of Thoreau′s thought exhibit a ′postmodern sensibility′ that crosses into the late twentieth century.

Explores the boundaries of contemporary debates over the environment and the state, and argues that in each of these debates, one side exaggerates the possibility of harmony between humans and the natural and social worlds, while the other insists upon the possibility of human mastery.' Cloth binding, 166 pages. New York University Press, 1987. Paperback. ISBN 0814710956.

Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and Politics in a Post-Hegelian Era

Religion & Spirituality

Worship & Devotion

New York University Press

In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment

In The Nature Of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment

Business & Money

Economics

Univ. of Minnesota Press

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

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

Duke University Press Books

Reference

Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman

In influx & efflux&nbsp;Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book&nbsp;Vibrant Matter:&nbsp;how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? "Influx & efflux"--a phrase borrowed&nbsp;&nbsp;from Whitman's "Song of Myself"--refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts involved in that process? What kinds of "I" and "we" can live well and act effectively in a world of so many other lively materialities? Drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers, Bennett links a nonanthropocentric model of self to a radically egalitarian pluralism and also to a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live. The book tries to enact the uncanny process by which we "write up" influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

In influx & efflux Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book Vibrant Matter: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx & efflux”—a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts involved in that process? What kinds of “I” and “we” can live well and act effectively in a world of so many other lively materialities? Drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers, Bennett links a nonanthropocentric model of self to a radically egalitarian pluralism and also to a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live. The book tries to enact the uncanny process by which we “write up” influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bennett, Jane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bennett, Jane