Jane Bennet's Vibrant Matter By Jane Bennet

Through her book, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennet questions our instinct to privilege or give more importance to human beings and their actions over non-human and inorganic matter. She calls for the acknowledgment of ‘thing-power’ and the vibrancy and aliveness of matter. Her ultimate goal lies with “human survival and happiness” and the promotion of “greener forms of human culture and more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities.” She uses a varied list of examples to explain, what she calls, vital materialism turning to both organic and inorganic matter. She argues that a shift to vital materialism is required for the salvation of nature and thereby human life.

She ascertains that as humans, us seeing matter

Soul-vitalism puts human life at the top of the hierarchy. Human life is seen as superior to everything else on earth because of “a unique life principle or soul” that makes human life qualitatively different from all other life. Seeing human life as more important than all else is what led to anti-abortion legislation and barriers to embryonic stem cell research under the Bush administration. For soul-vitalists, the distinction of inequality is not just between human life and non-human matter, but also between souls. They don’t believe in an equality of souls and claim that the “strong” souls must protect the “weak” ones. Bennet uses this theory to explain how someone can be both pro-life and pro-war. By distinguishing between “strong” and “weak” souls, one is able to justify the invasion of Iraq as an “act of caring for the weak that offers them gifts of vitality and freedom” . The inequality of souls also explains how pro-life activists can diminish the life of the woman carrying an unwanted fetus or the life of the child after its birth. An important question raised here is, “is there something intrinsic to vitalism, to faith in the autonomy of life that allies itself with violence?” . A question the author chooses to answer in the negative using Driesch’s theory of vitality, one that according

Using both, Bennett is able to offer her own theory of politics. One where actants interact together to form a ‘public’, not from will but as coalescing around problems, working out and through their own vibrancy . She distances vital materialism from environmentalism because the latter defines nature as a submissive object. Something humans create and evolve. She affirms that ‘materiality’ is a term that applies more evenly to humans and non-humans thereby aiding in horizontalising the relations between them. Allowing for a greater appreciation of the complicated interactions and entanglements of human and non-human actants. Vital materialism also forces us, as humans, to recognize a kinship between the human and the non-human because of the ‘material’ and ‘matter’ that exists in and on our bodies. Bennet argues that nature is not free of humanity and the self cannot be defined as something purely human. In this light, the concept of “self-interest” changes as we recognize that environmental decay affects the environmental, the social and the mental. Bennet concludes her book by calling to broaden the scope of our political interests to include saving the environment by working alongside non-human bodies and utilizing the power of interactions with vibrant