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The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.
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.
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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2001
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About the author
Jane Bennett
43 books70 followersJane Bennett is Professor of Political Theory and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics and Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild, and an editor of The Politics of Moralizing and In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 30, 2016
A little bit self-help, a little bit political philosophy . . . but never quite satisfying, and sometimes plain confounding.
Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, academics of various stripes started worrying that the world was disenchanted: drained of all meaning, abandoned by God to pure, cool reason, incapable of nourishing authentic communities. Of course, the world wasn't: these were academic concerns projected onto the world, though very influential ones, that led, eventually, to the 1960s and scholars confidently declaring that religion would soon enough fall away, a vestigial social function.
Except that the 1960s saw a renascence of fundamentalism, in the West, particularly, but not exclusively. Scholars puzzled over how this could happen, finally coming to realize they weren't really attending to the world around them, so much as being lulled by the theories they dreamed. We're now fifty years into this forced re-evaluation, and now academics are coming to realize that not only is religion more resilient than they imagined, but that the world was never disenchanted--indeed, that even the forces of disenchantment (capitalism, science, bureaucracy) were also sources of . . . wait for it . . . enchantment.
Bennett's book came at about the mid-point of this re-evaluation, though relatively early in the recognition that the world was enchanting--again, a re-evaluation by academics. The world has always presented enchantment for those who care to look. And so her book has the form of a brush-clearing, a gauntlet-throwing, a forced perspective. It is also a very short book, though, clocking in at less than 200 pages.
From today's perspective, the argument seems something less than novel, even for a book written by an academic. We know this now. It is also surprisingly repetitive for such a short monograph: it could easily have been boiled down into a single article; the best parts--in my opinion--all come from the same place, her dealing with the Epicureans and with Deleuze. (She spends an inordinate amount of time on Kafka, too.) Also for a short book, it has an unacceptable number of typographical errors. There are other weird crotchets, too, which I'll get to.
One of these is that the introduction is never quite done. Formally, the first chapter operates as the introduction, with Bennett defining enchantment--being overtaken by pure awareness for a moment--and arguing that scholars need to recognize that the world can still be enchanting, then extending that argument to suggest attending to enchantment will make more likely a politics of gratitude. (Her political philosophy--in focusing on enchantment as a kind of input and generosity a kind of output is focused mostly on affect, that is, feeling.) She lays out the rest of her argument here, but then will again reintroduce her ideas and list the places subjects will be discussed repeatedly in other chapters. For something so short, this is endlessly introduced.
The organization then takes a turn for the confusing. Rather than do the expected--lay out what has been said in the past, and where it's faults are--she turns to a particular kind of wonder (which is very similar to enchantment, though not isometric). From my read, it seems that this chapter belongs in the second-half of the book, when she lists other sites of modern enchantment, and there is not an obvious reason for this odd ordering.
At any rate, the chapter deals with cross-species encounters--by which she doesn't really mean the meeting of different species (she deals with inter-species connections only tangentially), but with the mixing of species, such as in the case of Kafka's Rotpeter, an ape-man, a parrot named Alex which can seemingly reason abstractly, and Deleuze's idea of a body without organs--which is to say recognizing that even our organs are parts of different networks, beyond our bodies, and so re-imagining them as primarily members of these networks rather than our bodies. She notes that all of these incidents provoke enchantment.
Which is fair enough, but also reveals another one of the odd crotchets: repeatedly, she turns to writings, fictional and theoretical, as places of enchantment. Which seems beside the point. Even the earlier theorists who said we lived in a disenchanted world admitted that fiction (and thought-experiments) could be wondrous. But those aren't the world. The fact that Kafka crafts enchanting scenarios says only a little bit about the material universe in which we live our everyday lives. It feels a bit like a cheat.
The next chapter then slips up the order again, in odd ways--perhaps this was why she felt the ned to constantly re-introduce her argument, because it did not fall out in expected ways. She dips far back in time to look at theories that existed before the disenchantment of the world. The locus classicus, for her, is Paracelsus's magical understanding of the world, in which the structure of reality on life paralleled that in the heavens (as above, so below), and the shape of an object could be a clue to its properties. Such an understanding necessarily required a God, a creator--for the world to have purpose--in order for the coupling to work.
She then turns her attention to Kant, who was more concerned with reason, and not with magic, but who still had a view based on teleology, if not as strong as one: Paracelus's god made sure that everything had a function, while for Kant function was something the mind looked for, but was not necessarily a true property of an object. She notes, though, that even here Kant was smuggling in some forms of teleology, with reason playing the role of God, *forcing* certain interpretations.
Finally, Bennett tips her hand by investigating Deleuze--who is a 20th century philosopher, and so proof of modern enchantment. (She throws in a few others here, including Bruno Latour.) Deleuze--and these others--see the world not as purely calculable, but a place of networks and connections, swarming with all kinds of things--and these things can be enchanting, as can the novel forms that come from their mixings.
Chapter four gives the release the reader's been waiting for--a look at the various theorists of disenchantment. It's oddly structured, though, first as a list consciously modeled on an article in a popular magazine, then giving several sections to each of the different authors she wants to investigate, but these sections are written as if by them, not her, then turning to critiques of these positions--critiques which have already been made in earlier chapters.
She starts, of course, with Max Weber, who presented his case for the world's disenchantment by capitalism, science, and rationalizing religion in 1918. She moves to Hans Blumenberg, who saw disenchantment as arising out of religious history: as humans discovered the laws that structured material reality, it left less and less place for God to work, placing unconscionable barriers on His powers, to the point that He became less and less important. Simon Critchley builds on both of these--God is dead, the world is meaningless--but we need not look back for a Golden Age: this is good, and we should be humble servants of the world and inculcate it with meaning through our imagination.
Weirdly, Bennett then pivots to offer a contrary position--the one her whole book has the burden to carry. She says that the material world can be seen as enchanted--that Weber, Blumenberg, and Critchley's ideas are incomplete. Here she turns to the Epicureans, who saw the world atomistically, composed of minute particles that sometimes join together into new forms--eventually creating all of the material world. It is a form of material monism that continually creates vital, novel things. Which leads her to . . . nanotechnology. I mean, I get the point--small things to small things--but it's a stretch, and fits oddly in the chapter. What she is saying is that this new technology should be seen as a source of wonder. Even still, she's not quite done, but then goes on to consider ethics and introduce the following chapters.
Chapters five and six comprise a pair (it should have been a trio, with chapter two), looking at two sites of modern enchantment. One is complexity: the modern world weaves together things in new arrays, constantly, and these we should be enchanted with, she says. Which is fine, and follows directly from her consideration of the Epicureans and Deleuze, though she may push her point to hard when she argues for how enchanting modern bureaucracies are. Frustrating is a better word. The other site is advertising, and this section feels simultaneously dated and and naive. She starts by wondering at an ad campaign by Gap, then gets down to having to argue against a vast literature which has it that advertising is enchanting in a bad way--a sorcerer's enchantment, not wonder--and never really overcomes the bulk of this tradition. The best she can say is that there is some room to find enchantment here, too, which, you know, okay, but seems to miss the point. Watching a lion eat your innards can be enchanting, too.
Chapter seven has Bennett arguing for her preferred ethics: one of generosity. It's only as persuasive as the reader's attachment to generosity. Personally, I like the idea, and endorse it, but even Bennett has to acknowledge it doesn't follow directly from what came before. Even seeing the world as enchanted still gives a number of possible ethical responses. One of these is generosity--the world is vibrant and vital and gives to us, so we should be willing to give to others and be humble about this buzzing, enchanting reality.
Chapter eight again emphasizes the need for humility. She is afraid of becoming a hard-ass like Kant. The categories she adduces, she admits--indeed, the very idea of seeing the world as a mixing and hybridizing of tiny particles--is as much a thought experiment as a description of reality. These imaginings are good to think with, but she is not devoted to them as absolutely true--she is advocating a weak ontology, she says, acknowledging categories but not insisting upon them.
What is laid out in this admittedly brief book could have been said in an even shorter compass: her main points of reference are Kafka, Deleuze, and the Epicureans, and these ideas probably could have been spelled out in a paper, with far less repetition. Such a presentation might have solved some other odd problems. Bennett is wedded to the idea of enchantment as connected to chanting and thus sound. So again and again she emphasizes the importance of sound and voice--it's not integral to what she is saying and gets distracting. It feels forced. Maybe in a paper, too, she would have been more circumspect about referring to William Connolly. She mentions him several times in the text and cites his ideas as corroborating her own--as though they had independently come up with these ideas, all the more evidence of their rightness. What she neglects to say is that they are married. (Similarly, she cites other theoreticians without quite acknowledging that they have contributed to each other's volumes, suggesting a particular theoretical movement is the same as broad agreement.)
Generally, though, and despite all the criticisms, I find what Bennett says here entirely amenable. I agree with her points: that the world is composed of vital, vibrant things. That the world is not disenchanted. That enchantment comes not only from nature but also the things humans create--and that these creations take on their own lives beyond us. That acting from generosity would make the world better. And that if we see the world as enchanted, including the things that are not us, and the things that we make, we are more likely to take responsibility for them and and care about them. Who cares what you do to a dead world? But to one full of potent magic?
That *matters*.
Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, academics of various stripes started worrying that the world was disenchanted: drained of all meaning, abandoned by God to pure, cool reason, incapable of nourishing authentic communities. Of course, the world wasn't: these were academic concerns projected onto the world, though very influential ones, that led, eventually, to the 1960s and scholars confidently declaring that religion would soon enough fall away, a vestigial social function.
Except that the 1960s saw a renascence of fundamentalism, in the West, particularly, but not exclusively. Scholars puzzled over how this could happen, finally coming to realize they weren't really attending to the world around them, so much as being lulled by the theories they dreamed. We're now fifty years into this forced re-evaluation, and now academics are coming to realize that not only is religion more resilient than they imagined, but that the world was never disenchanted--indeed, that even the forces of disenchantment (capitalism, science, bureaucracy) were also sources of . . . wait for it . . . enchantment.
Bennett's book came at about the mid-point of this re-evaluation, though relatively early in the recognition that the world was enchanting--again, a re-evaluation by academics. The world has always presented enchantment for those who care to look. And so her book has the form of a brush-clearing, a gauntlet-throwing, a forced perspective. It is also a very short book, though, clocking in at less than 200 pages.
From today's perspective, the argument seems something less than novel, even for a book written by an academic. We know this now. It is also surprisingly repetitive for such a short monograph: it could easily have been boiled down into a single article; the best parts--in my opinion--all come from the same place, her dealing with the Epicureans and with Deleuze. (She spends an inordinate amount of time on Kafka, too.) Also for a short book, it has an unacceptable number of typographical errors. There are other weird crotchets, too, which I'll get to.
One of these is that the introduction is never quite done. Formally, the first chapter operates as the introduction, with Bennett defining enchantment--being overtaken by pure awareness for a moment--and arguing that scholars need to recognize that the world can still be enchanting, then extending that argument to suggest attending to enchantment will make more likely a politics of gratitude. (Her political philosophy--in focusing on enchantment as a kind of input and generosity a kind of output is focused mostly on affect, that is, feeling.) She lays out the rest of her argument here, but then will again reintroduce her ideas and list the places subjects will be discussed repeatedly in other chapters. For something so short, this is endlessly introduced.
The organization then takes a turn for the confusing. Rather than do the expected--lay out what has been said in the past, and where it's faults are--she turns to a particular kind of wonder (which is very similar to enchantment, though not isometric). From my read, it seems that this chapter belongs in the second-half of the book, when she lists other sites of modern enchantment, and there is not an obvious reason for this odd ordering.
At any rate, the chapter deals with cross-species encounters--by which she doesn't really mean the meeting of different species (she deals with inter-species connections only tangentially), but with the mixing of species, such as in the case of Kafka's Rotpeter, an ape-man, a parrot named Alex which can seemingly reason abstractly, and Deleuze's idea of a body without organs--which is to say recognizing that even our organs are parts of different networks, beyond our bodies, and so re-imagining them as primarily members of these networks rather than our bodies. She notes that all of these incidents provoke enchantment.
Which is fair enough, but also reveals another one of the odd crotchets: repeatedly, she turns to writings, fictional and theoretical, as places of enchantment. Which seems beside the point. Even the earlier theorists who said we lived in a disenchanted world admitted that fiction (and thought-experiments) could be wondrous. But those aren't the world. The fact that Kafka crafts enchanting scenarios says only a little bit about the material universe in which we live our everyday lives. It feels a bit like a cheat.
The next chapter then slips up the order again, in odd ways--perhaps this was why she felt the ned to constantly re-introduce her argument, because it did not fall out in expected ways. She dips far back in time to look at theories that existed before the disenchantment of the world. The locus classicus, for her, is Paracelsus's magical understanding of the world, in which the structure of reality on life paralleled that in the heavens (as above, so below), and the shape of an object could be a clue to its properties. Such an understanding necessarily required a God, a creator--for the world to have purpose--in order for the coupling to work.
She then turns her attention to Kant, who was more concerned with reason, and not with magic, but who still had a view based on teleology, if not as strong as one: Paracelus's god made sure that everything had a function, while for Kant function was something the mind looked for, but was not necessarily a true property of an object. She notes, though, that even here Kant was smuggling in some forms of teleology, with reason playing the role of God, *forcing* certain interpretations.
Finally, Bennett tips her hand by investigating Deleuze--who is a 20th century philosopher, and so proof of modern enchantment. (She throws in a few others here, including Bruno Latour.) Deleuze--and these others--see the world not as purely calculable, but a place of networks and connections, swarming with all kinds of things--and these things can be enchanting, as can the novel forms that come from their mixings.
Chapter four gives the release the reader's been waiting for--a look at the various theorists of disenchantment. It's oddly structured, though, first as a list consciously modeled on an article in a popular magazine, then giving several sections to each of the different authors she wants to investigate, but these sections are written as if by them, not her, then turning to critiques of these positions--critiques which have already been made in earlier chapters.
She starts, of course, with Max Weber, who presented his case for the world's disenchantment by capitalism, science, and rationalizing religion in 1918. She moves to Hans Blumenberg, who saw disenchantment as arising out of religious history: as humans discovered the laws that structured material reality, it left less and less place for God to work, placing unconscionable barriers on His powers, to the point that He became less and less important. Simon Critchley builds on both of these--God is dead, the world is meaningless--but we need not look back for a Golden Age: this is good, and we should be humble servants of the world and inculcate it with meaning through our imagination.
Weirdly, Bennett then pivots to offer a contrary position--the one her whole book has the burden to carry. She says that the material world can be seen as enchanted--that Weber, Blumenberg, and Critchley's ideas are incomplete. Here she turns to the Epicureans, who saw the world atomistically, composed of minute particles that sometimes join together into new forms--eventually creating all of the material world. It is a form of material monism that continually creates vital, novel things. Which leads her to . . . nanotechnology. I mean, I get the point--small things to small things--but it's a stretch, and fits oddly in the chapter. What she is saying is that this new technology should be seen as a source of wonder. Even still, she's not quite done, but then goes on to consider ethics and introduce the following chapters.
Chapters five and six comprise a pair (it should have been a trio, with chapter two), looking at two sites of modern enchantment. One is complexity: the modern world weaves together things in new arrays, constantly, and these we should be enchanted with, she says. Which is fine, and follows directly from her consideration of the Epicureans and Deleuze, though she may push her point to hard when she argues for how enchanting modern bureaucracies are. Frustrating is a better word. The other site is advertising, and this section feels simultaneously dated and and naive. She starts by wondering at an ad campaign by Gap, then gets down to having to argue against a vast literature which has it that advertising is enchanting in a bad way--a sorcerer's enchantment, not wonder--and never really overcomes the bulk of this tradition. The best she can say is that there is some room to find enchantment here, too, which, you know, okay, but seems to miss the point. Watching a lion eat your innards can be enchanting, too.
Chapter seven has Bennett arguing for her preferred ethics: one of generosity. It's only as persuasive as the reader's attachment to generosity. Personally, I like the idea, and endorse it, but even Bennett has to acknowledge it doesn't follow directly from what came before. Even seeing the world as enchanted still gives a number of possible ethical responses. One of these is generosity--the world is vibrant and vital and gives to us, so we should be willing to give to others and be humble about this buzzing, enchanting reality.
Chapter eight again emphasizes the need for humility. She is afraid of becoming a hard-ass like Kant. The categories she adduces, she admits--indeed, the very idea of seeing the world as a mixing and hybridizing of tiny particles--is as much a thought experiment as a description of reality. These imaginings are good to think with, but she is not devoted to them as absolutely true--she is advocating a weak ontology, she says, acknowledging categories but not insisting upon them.
What is laid out in this admittedly brief book could have been said in an even shorter compass: her main points of reference are Kafka, Deleuze, and the Epicureans, and these ideas probably could have been spelled out in a paper, with far less repetition. Such a presentation might have solved some other odd problems. Bennett is wedded to the idea of enchantment as connected to chanting and thus sound. So again and again she emphasizes the importance of sound and voice--it's not integral to what she is saying and gets distracting. It feels forced. Maybe in a paper, too, she would have been more circumspect about referring to William Connolly. She mentions him several times in the text and cites his ideas as corroborating her own--as though they had independently come up with these ideas, all the more evidence of their rightness. What she neglects to say is that they are married. (Similarly, she cites other theoreticians without quite acknowledging that they have contributed to each other's volumes, suggesting a particular theoretical movement is the same as broad agreement.)
Generally, though, and despite all the criticisms, I find what Bennett says here entirely amenable. I agree with her points: that the world is composed of vital, vibrant things. That the world is not disenchanted. That enchantment comes not only from nature but also the things humans create--and that these creations take on their own lives beyond us. That acting from generosity would make the world better. And that if we see the world as enchanted, including the things that are not us, and the things that we make, we are more likely to take responsibility for them and and care about them. Who cares what you do to a dead world? But to one full of potent magic?
That *matters*.
July 6, 2020
Jane Bennett is most famous as the author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Her work is part of an emerging and diverse group of thinkers - among them Karen Barad, William Connolly, and Eduardo Kohn - working under the rubric "new materialism" or "vital materialism". These thinkers aim to change our view of nature, to regard it as a living and interactive sphere in which human participate, rather than an unthinking resource available for human exploitation.
Chapter 1: The Wonder of Minor Experiences starts off The Enchantment of Modern Life by challenging Max Weber's famous notion of the "disenchantment of the world." Not only does enchantment continue in the modern world, argues Bennett, it is also necessary for creating an ethics of generosity and care.
Chapter 2: Cross-Species Encounters examines the importance of hybrids - what Bennett calls "crossings" - in the creation of this new ethics. Bennett examines some examples: the goat Andoar in Tournier's Friday, or, The Other Island, Rotpeter in Kafka's "Report to an Academy", a parrot named Alex that can think abstractly, and Deleuze and Guattari's "Body Without Organs". There is also some discussion of Haraway's cyborgs and Latour's notions of hybridity. While Bennett acknowledges these could breed monsters and have other negative effects, she assures us that the effects will largely be ethical and positive.
Chapter 3: The Marvelous Worlds of Paracelsus, Kant and Deleuze takes us on a tour of how these three thinkers show a movement away from teleological thinking while preserving room for wonder and enchantment. Paracelsus sees the world as divinely planned, with everything amazingly integrated into everything else: God, he imagines, has put his "signature" on everything he created. Kant preserves this sense of wonder, argues Bennett, but he divides it between the internal wonder of reason and the external wonder of the supersensible, the latter retaining the vestiges of divine teleology. Finally, the Deleuzian notion of "becoming" provides wonder without teleology.
Chapter 4: Disenchantment Tales summarizes three major accounts of the disenchantment narratives. Bennett chooses to focus on Max Weber, Hans Blumenberg, and Simon Critchley. It's useful as an overview, but Bennett is not exactly clear in differentiating which parts she agrees or disagrees with.
Chapter 5: Complexity and Enchantment focuses on a new movement known as ecospirituality. Bennett talks about Thoreau, Latour, Lucretius, and Kafka. It is all highly unconvincing.
Chapter 6: Commodity Fetishism and Commodity Enchantment tries to reconcile enchantment with certain aspects of political economy. Bennett pushes really hard to make Marx (who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus) and Adorno and Horkheimer agree with her on this one, but it is just not happening.
Chapter 7: Ethical Energetics looks at the interplay between aesthetics and ethics in the work of Kant, Schiller, and Foucault. I get what Bennett is trying to do here, but it seems somehow tangential to the main concerns of these thinkers, especially Foucault, who remained ambivalent about the conditions of modernity.
Chapter 8: Attachments and Refrains attempts to deploy weak ontology to champion the cause of a new ethics. And boy, is it ever weak. Basically, weak ontology can be summed up as a Field of Dreams, "build it and they will come" form of fantasy.
For all of Bennett's knowledge, I kept on wondering why there was no commentary on the rise of a culture of sensibility in the eighteenth century. Wasn't this an attempt to recapture wonder and enchantment? She does talk briefly about romanticism and its importance, but not this crucial period that preceded (and greatly influenced) romanticism.
Overall, I admire the aspirations of what Bennett is trying to do in this book. Certainly her thought is erudite and well-researched, but despite its critique of other, more callow attempts at re-enchanting the world, it still seems rather naive itself. I love the notion of an ethics of joy, which Bennett derives in part from Nietzsche, but that joy needs to have an effective (and affective) force that changes the world.
Chapter 1: The Wonder of Minor Experiences starts off The Enchantment of Modern Life by challenging Max Weber's famous notion of the "disenchantment of the world." Not only does enchantment continue in the modern world, argues Bennett, it is also necessary for creating an ethics of generosity and care.
Chapter 2: Cross-Species Encounters examines the importance of hybrids - what Bennett calls "crossings" - in the creation of this new ethics. Bennett examines some examples: the goat Andoar in Tournier's Friday, or, The Other Island, Rotpeter in Kafka's "Report to an Academy", a parrot named Alex that can think abstractly, and Deleuze and Guattari's "Body Without Organs". There is also some discussion of Haraway's cyborgs and Latour's notions of hybridity. While Bennett acknowledges these could breed monsters and have other negative effects, she assures us that the effects will largely be ethical and positive.
Chapter 3: The Marvelous Worlds of Paracelsus, Kant and Deleuze takes us on a tour of how these three thinkers show a movement away from teleological thinking while preserving room for wonder and enchantment. Paracelsus sees the world as divinely planned, with everything amazingly integrated into everything else: God, he imagines, has put his "signature" on everything he created. Kant preserves this sense of wonder, argues Bennett, but he divides it between the internal wonder of reason and the external wonder of the supersensible, the latter retaining the vestiges of divine teleology. Finally, the Deleuzian notion of "becoming" provides wonder without teleology.
Chapter 4: Disenchantment Tales summarizes three major accounts of the disenchantment narratives. Bennett chooses to focus on Max Weber, Hans Blumenberg, and Simon Critchley. It's useful as an overview, but Bennett is not exactly clear in differentiating which parts she agrees or disagrees with.
Chapter 5: Complexity and Enchantment focuses on a new movement known as ecospirituality. Bennett talks about Thoreau, Latour, Lucretius, and Kafka. It is all highly unconvincing.
Chapter 6: Commodity Fetishism and Commodity Enchantment tries to reconcile enchantment with certain aspects of political economy. Bennett pushes really hard to make Marx (who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus) and Adorno and Horkheimer agree with her on this one, but it is just not happening.
Chapter 7: Ethical Energetics looks at the interplay between aesthetics and ethics in the work of Kant, Schiller, and Foucault. I get what Bennett is trying to do here, but it seems somehow tangential to the main concerns of these thinkers, especially Foucault, who remained ambivalent about the conditions of modernity.
Chapter 8: Attachments and Refrains attempts to deploy weak ontology to champion the cause of a new ethics. And boy, is it ever weak. Basically, weak ontology can be summed up as a Field of Dreams, "build it and they will come" form of fantasy.
For all of Bennett's knowledge, I kept on wondering why there was no commentary on the rise of a culture of sensibility in the eighteenth century. Wasn't this an attempt to recapture wonder and enchantment? She does talk briefly about romanticism and its importance, but not this crucial period that preceded (and greatly influenced) romanticism.
Overall, I admire the aspirations of what Bennett is trying to do in this book. Certainly her thought is erudite and well-researched, but despite its critique of other, more callow attempts at re-enchanting the world, it still seems rather naive itself. I love the notion of an ethics of joy, which Bennett derives in part from Nietzsche, but that joy needs to have an effective (and affective) force that changes the world.
August 5, 2011
A 3.5 would be more accurate. I sympathize (sometimes empathize?) with the author's assertion that affect must be part of any "ethical" approach-- but I feel that she's reaching sometimes, in terms of granting a variety of troubling things the power to enchant. (I don't think she fully explores the implications, for example, of enchantment-- even within her particular definition of the word-- with robotics, commercialist constructions, and so forth.) An absolutely valuable conversation-starter, though-- and I always appreciate anyone who brings in Kakfa in a thoughtful way.
February 4, 2021
Being a Romantic at heart, I gave this book a go, but sadly became disenchanted with it and gave up half way through. This is something I only rarely do.
May 15, 2007
Still reading, but so far it's great. Bennett's trying to offer an counter-alternative to the "modernity is defined by disenchantment" thesis of 20th Century (e.g., Marx, Weber).
August 31, 2017
Bennett is never not interesting and brilliant, but this book lacks the sense of urgency of Vibrant Matter.
July 4, 2023
so i did skim this book bc i was writing a paper .. and it is dense .. however it is very good and put words to a lot of ideas i’ve thought abt and wanted to discuss .. the idea of enchantment super interesting if u like care abt the feeling of magic and being alive 🙇♀️🙇♀️ and our connection (or lack of) to life itself - and also if ur looking for the vocabulary to describe feelings of awe - or to critically examine modern/capitalist world esp in relation to community or consumerism- and also in thinking abt art/music and the power it holds to connect us to being alive with eachother and caring for the earth (bc enchantment 💖💖) i also think it supports the idea that we need to have a sense of deep love and connection to community and to the earth in order to want to preserve/keep safe/ and love these beings
ok that was a lot of words - good book!!
ok that was a lot of words - good book!!
October 21, 2012
Bit heavy on continental philosophy at times, reader is better off having studied her Deleuze and Marx. But even without such a background, as is the case with me, it's absolutely delight to read. Probably in big part since I found myself agreeing with most of Bennett's story.
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