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Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 200 pp. $74.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.
A pile of trash, a scrap of metal, an overtaxed energy grid, hungry worms, and embryonic stem cells: these are just some of the main characters in Jane Bennett's short though ambitious work that lays out her theory of vital materiality. While at first glance, a book combining such subjects might appear to be apolitical, Bennett's work, and particularly her first chapter, makes clear the deeply political stakes of her project. This is a book that seeks to complicate the terms "life" and "matter," but even more importantly, it seeks to define a politics-one that Bennett calls "vital materiality"-which questions the distinction that is at the heart of the American system: namely, that human beings are the supreme and most important life form. Ultimately, underlying her political philosophy is that if-as humans-we accept on a political level that all things-living and not-are in Gilles Deleuze's words "ontologically one, formally diverse," then, according to Bennett, "human decency and a decent politics" would emerge (p. xi).
Despite appearances that Vibrant Matter continues the posthumanist tradition, Bennett insists that at the heart of her concern is human interest. She explains in her introduction: "My claims here are motivated by a self-interested or conative concern for human survival and happiness: I want to promote greener forms of human culture and more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities" (p. ix; emphasis in original). In other words, and as she emphasizes in her concluding chapter, we should be motivated to adopt a vital materialist politics that no longer privileges humans-or any living forms-over seemingly inanimate matter, because ultimately such a politics will make our human lives better. While Bennett may be critiqued for admitting that at the end, the qualitative life of human beings is most important to her, she seems to readily admit throughout her work that to be human is to be unable to escape being human. Therefore, while at the heart of her argument is a posthumanist claim that de-privileges humanity as the center through which all political systems must be understood, Bennett concludes-with much nuance-that as human beings, we cannot help but center ourselves, even if...