Quotes from Jane Bennett

The pure power of a life can manifest as beatitude, or as an unspeakable, sheer violence...

Seasoning one's claims with self-irony and modesty, cultivating a tolerance for moral ambiguity, periodically practicing normative reticence, building up a resistance to the pleasure of purity, minding your own business, doing what you can to forget to wreak vengeance, defending negative freedom even if there is no such thing, and playing around are the best you can do. But that's quite a lot.

A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.

Each human is a heterogeneous compound of vibrant matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. (...) And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans.

a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature.

Agentic capacity is now seen as differentially distributed across a wider range of ontological types. This

we are much better at admitting that humans infect nature than we are at admitting that nonhumanity infects culture, for the latter entails the blasphemous idea that nonhumans—trash, bacteria, stem cells, food, metal, technologies, weather—are actants more than objects. Latour

Why should one bother to criticize what is inevitable or challenge what is omnipotent?

Ethical politics requires more than rational demystification.