The Enchantment of Modern Life

by Bennett, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780691088129
• ISBN10: 0691088128
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-07-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
The Wonder of Minor Experiences	3	(14)
Queasiness	3	(2)
A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment	5	(1)
Reuse and Recycle	6	(3)
Enchantment without Design	9	(3)
Joyful Attachment	12	(1)
How the Story Goes	13	(4)
Cross-Species Encounters	17	(16)
Crossing and Enchantment	17	(1)
Andoar's Transcendence	18	(1)
Rotpeter's Way Out	19	(2)
Alex Changes the Subject	21	(3)
Body without Organs	24	(4)
My Wager	28	(2)
Marvels and Monsters	30	(3)
The Marvelous Worlds of Paracelsus, Kant, and Deleuze	33	(23)
The Satyrion Root	34	(2)
Enchantment and Repetition	36	(4)
Kantian Wonders	40	(9)
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Thinker	49	(7)
Disenchantment Tales	56	(35)
``It's a Calculable World''	57	(8)
Max Weber
``Disenchantment without Regret''	65	(10)
Hans Blumenberg
``An Ethics of Finitude''	75	(5)
Simon Critchley
Toward an Enchanted Materialism	80	(11)
Complexity and Enchantment	91	(20)
Thoreau's Nature	92	(3)
Latour's Network	95	(4)
The Return of the Swerve	99	(3)
Lawful Nature as a Regulative Ideal	102	(1)
The Bifurcation Point as a Swerve	103	(1)
Social Complexity and Kafkaesque Enchantment	104	(7)
Commodity Fetishism and Commodity Enchantment	111	(20)
Swinging Khakis	111	(3)
The Dangers of Commodity Culture	114	(2)
The Commodity as Fetish	116	(3)
Marx and the Swerve	119	(2)
The Critical Potential of (Commercial) Art	121	(3)
Affect and Thought	124	(2)
Repetition	126	(1)
Yea Saying	127	(1)
The Limits of Refusal	128	(3)
Ethical Energetics	131	(28)
The Aesthetic Disposition	131	(2)
Moral Sentiments	133	(4)
Aesthetic Play and the Barbarism of Reason	137	(7)
Schiller to Foucault: Micropractices of Ethics	144	(4)
The Dangers of Aestheticization	148	(4)
Language and the Code Dimension of Ethics	152	(4)
The Ethics of Enchanted Materialism	156	(3)
Attachments and Refrains	159	(16)
Enchantment as a Weak Ontology	160	(6)
The Sonorous Cosmos	166	(2)
Attachment as a Gift	168	(1)
Plants, Ants, Robopets, and Other Enchanting Things	169	(6)
Notes	175	(34)
Index	209