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  • Is There a Place for Spirit in Jane Bennett's Vital Materialism?
  • Robert Baker (bio)

There's a fable that floats through our culture: a romantic writer walks away from the city, or the cave, or the getting and spending, and enters a wider region of life. Where does this fable come from? It comes in part from a long pastoral tradition. Pastoral has always had a twofold vision. Idealizing the countryside from the point of view of the city, idealizing nature from the point of view of culture, it has sketched an evaluative if often ironic opposition between the rural and the urban, the country and the court, the simple and the complex, the older and the newer. This dialectical opposition, as Empson shows in Some Versions of Pastoral, is highly mobile: it can readily be brought within the city itself. There is, further, an important metaphysical horizon that, though it emerges outside the space of literature, enters deeply into the pastoral tradition. This is the Axial Age myth of inwardness and transcendence, according to which a religious or philosophical ascesis, a simple life that has shed the superfluous, is the way to wisdom, virtue, and spiritual freedom. The pastoral myth evokes a turn from the entanglements of the city to the quiet clarity of the countryside. The Axial Age myth evokes a turn from the entanglements of the world to the inward depth of a life open to a transcendent source. This capacious rhyme is transformed in the romantic period: an older Axial Age practice of care for the self is translated into secular terms while, at the same time, an older Axial Age picture of a transcendent source is translated into a picture of nature as the immanent horizon of the whole.

This romantic fable has had a large influence on the environmentalist thought of the past several decades. Environmentalist thinkers, to be sure, have wrestled with the romantic tradition to which they are indebted, criticizing it for its naive pictures of the self, its essentialist [End Page 1] pictures of nature, its neglect of the way history shapes what we take nature to be, its tendency to value inwardness over attention. Yet the long line of influence is unmistakable. The romantic fable I've recalled has also had an influence on the new materialisms of our time. The philosophical approaches given this name, resisting the constructivist perspective so important in our culture over the past several decades, are animated by environmentalist concerns. The new materialisms have an ontological or natural emphasis different from the social emphasis of the historical materialisms in the tradition of Marx.1

In this essay I want to engage the new materialist work of Jane Bennett, in particular her third and fourth books, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics and Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Bennett's vital materialism brings together Lucretius's Epicureanism, Nietzsche's vitalism, and Deleuze's metaphysics of open-ended becoming. The romantic fable with which I've begun appears in Bennett's work in the form of a tension between the familiar world of blank matter and disenchanted routine, on the one hand, and the promise of vital matter and generosity of spirit, on the other. In Bennett, as in many romantic writers, as for that matter in many older spiritual traditions, the paradox is that the elsewhere that beckons us to a fuller life turns out to be the very place we are. Why, then, are we not there?

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For more than two centuries, modern society has been shaped by a dialectical tension between an Enlightenment perspective and a Romantic perspective. This is the story told by Charles Taylor in his Hegel and Modern Society. The ideals of the Enlightenment project include the disenchantment of the world; the scientific and technological mastery of nature; the utilitarian reconstruction of the social world for the sake of greater knowledge, freedom, and prosperity; the liberal state and the market economy; and what Taylor calls the "disengaged" self, that is to say, a self that adopts a critical or strategic stance toward all that it encounters. The ideals of the Romantic counterproject include a...

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