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

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

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

She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter. In her view, it’s a useful attitude. “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy or inspiration to enact ecological projects,” she writes. We might find it hard to “contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously

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

being genuinely open to and affected by everything around us means that there is no picking and choosing. It is everything or nothing—the good, the bad, and the ugly

take perspectives that seem implausible and find the good intuitions embodied in them, and then go with it

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