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. (shrink)

From the book: What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!

Theodor Adorno's concept of 'natural history' [Naturgeschichte] was central for a number of Adorno's theoretical projects, but remains elusive. In this essay, I analyse different dimensions of the concept of natural history, distinguishing amongst (a) a reflection on the normative and methodological bases of philosophical anthropology and critical social science; (b) a conception of critical memory oriented toward the preservation of the memory of historical suffering; and (c) the notion of 'mindfulness of nature in the subject' provocatively asserted in Max (...) Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. These strands are united by the notion of transience and goal of developing a critical theory sensitive to the transient in history. The essay concludes by suggesting some implications of an expanded concept of natural history for issues in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

The problematics of alienation have played a rather significant role in the discussions\nabout the sense and relevance of Marxism which have taken place in\nthe last twenty years. &dquo;Back to Marx&dquo; was at least one of the main slogans of\nthat ideological/intellectual movement, which evolved both in the East and\nWest from the mid-fifties and which is sometimes referred to as the trend of\n&dquo;humanist&dquo; Marxism. The idea of a &dquo;Marx-Renaissance&dquo; was undoubtedly\ndirected first of all against the completely petrified framework of institutionalized\nMarxism, turned into (...) a &dquo;religion of state&dquo; legitimating the domination\nof a bureaucratic apparatus over the population of East European societies.\nThe &dquo;rediscovery&dquo; and &dquo;rehabilitation&dquo; of the young Marx, the emphasis on\nthe continuity of his thought, meant not only a reintroduction of a number\nof categories, problems and ideas, which were thought fruitful in their critical\ninsight into contemporary conditions and which the impoverished and distorted\nversion of Marxism in official communist ideology (deliberately) failed\nto take into account: it also meant a global challenge to the appropriation of\nthe Marxian tradition by an apologetic ideology, which disguised its positivistic\ncontent through the form of an old-fashioned, dogmatic metaphysics; it\nwas an attempt to recover the critical/emancipatory meaning of this tradition\nwithin the realities of the twentieth century. It was in this context that the\nnotion of &dquo;alienation&dquo; again reappeared -- as a concept through which one\ncould articulate an attitude which was critical simultaneously of Western\ncapitalist and so-called &dquo;socialist&dquo; Eastern societies. Within the framework of\nEast European realities even the rather abstract character of this notion found\nin young Marx, was well suited to the theoretical vagueness and the practical\nlimitations of this new-found leftist criticism of home-societies. (shrink)

In his attempt at a renewal of the concept of reification, Axel Honneth has referred to reification as a kind of forgetting. He uses an epigraph from Adorno and Horkheimer’s work to introduce this theme. This article considers the different accounts that are given by Honneth, on the one hand, and Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other, as to the way that reification is a forgetting of core experiential capacities of intersubjective human relations. It argues that Honneth’s account relies too (...) much on a foundational and undifferentiated notion of ‘empathetic engagement’, and that in order to articulate the damage done by reification, we need to contend with the more radical notion of forgetting that is outlined in Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. (shrink)