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 event...

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 in...

Taking seriously the argument that things have politics, Political Matter seeks to develop a fully materialist theory of politics, one that opens new possibilities for imagining the relationship between scientific and political practices. The contributors assert that without such a theory the profusion of complex materials with and through which we live-plastic bags, smart cars, and long-life lightbulbs, for example-too often leaves us oscillating between fearful repudiation and g...

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 a...

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the...

I was born in the flat fertile Mississippi Delta in 1940. I grew up in a white clapboard plantation house on the heels of the Great Depression when cotton was still running the show in the south and well before the Civil Rights Movement. Love took me out of the Delta, and it was love that brought me back, for there are some things that cannot be forgotten or left behind. So, here it is. After all the years that have come and gone, here is a Delta girl seeing the grand old South through a w...

Pathologist Toni Day knows her mother like the back of her hand. When her mother calls and asks her to investigate the disappearance of her best friend’s husband, Dick, she knows better than to argue. Soon, Toni and her husband, Hal, are on their way back to her hometown of Long Beach, California, where another mystery awaits. Dick’s wife, Doris, is convinced that the historic house she shares with Dick is haunted. To make things even more complicated, Doris is also suffering from a myster...

Lee sat in the window facing the Bridge as calmly as his emotions would allow, waiting the moment when this day would enhance his lifes story. He drank the last of his coffee, spoke good-day to the waiter, and walked out into the morning mist off the East River. He strode toward the Bridge, many thoughts crowding his youthful mind. He had one more thing to do and now was the time

Pathologist Toni Day and her husband, Hal, are mystified when she starts receiving grisly Christmas cards depicting murders, each accompanied by a twisted verse from The Twelve Days of Christmas, and she and her partners are suddenly inundated with autopsies on the corresponding bodies. The victims are members of a jury that convicted Toni’s old boyfriend Robbie of kidnapping and sent him to prison. Robbie is now out on parole and is presumably systematically killing off the jury that put ...

The Politics of Moralizing issues a stern warning about the risks of speaking, writing, and thinking in a manner too confident about one's own judgments and asks, "Can a clear line be drawn between dogmatism and simple certainty and indignation?" Bennett and Shapiro enter the debate by questioning what has become a popular, even pervasive, cultural narrative told by both the left and the right: the story of the West's moral decline, degeneration, or confusion. Contributors explore...

Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild explores how Thoreau crafted a life open to "the Wild," a term that marks the startling element of foreignness in every object of experience, however familiar. Thoreau's encounters with nature, Bennett argues, allowed him to resist his all-too-human tendency toward intellectual laziness, social conformity, and political complacency. Bennett pursues this theme by constructing a series of dialogues between Thoreau and our contemporari...

Summer wheat, heavy with grain, waved in the July wind, and when touched by the afternoon sun, cast a golden glow on the rocks of Cemetery Ridge. Jonathan stood with his countrymen, rifle drawn, wiping sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of a ragged Confederate uniform. Then the nod, Longstreet to Pickett, whose men charged screaming the blood-curdling Rebel yell. Brave soldiers, strength pressed to the breach, fell like autumn leaves. Blood ran freely down the hill. Gettysburg was a troug...