The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things

Everyone is in a complicated relationship with things

A force of nature is obviously just the opposite of an inert actor,” Latour wrote

Bennett uses the phrase “thing power” to capture the lively and active qualities of objects

Bennett’s musings have an ethical component: if a nuisance tree, or a dead tree, or a dead rat is my kin, then everything is kin—even a piece of trash. And I’m more likely to value things that are kindred to me, seeing them as notable and worthy in themselves

Stuff has agency. Inanimate matter is not inert. Everything is always doing something

When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls

If you encounter somebody that is different from you, maybe, if you’re good at lingering for a moment or two in wonder at that person, you can postpone the moment of fear or rejection,” she told me. The subtitle to “Vibrant Matter”—“a political ecology of things”—hints at an interpersonal politics: in her view, politics should always include a sens

Human beings have a lot of difficult work to do if we’re to learn to recognize the inherent worth of all vibrant matter.