198THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERImportantly, both object-oriented ontology and vital materialism ul-
timately focus on the challenges involved in speaking without erasing the
independence of things or without obscuring the intensity of impersonal
affect^15 —this is the essence of a project that structurally, in part, resem-
bles human/animal studies’ interest in the possibility of writing histories
in which animals are not erased.^16 In Bennett’s encounter with objects at
the beginning of Vibrant Matter, a rat simply appears dead, or so the au-
thor suspects. In the same paragraph, Bennett wonders if the animal
might be asleep instead. Whichever the case, the alive/dead status of the
rat does not matter much to her.^17 From this perspective, the animal skins
and taxidermy mounts in Agrimiká should ontologically share the same
vibrancy. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett emphasizes the continuity between
the traditionally living and the nonliving categories by focusing on the
vital materials that compose both: the dead rat’s body still is a living site
for bacteria, microorganisms, fleas, mites—the livingness of the rat’s or-
ganism has thus shattered into the livingness of multiple networks of mi-
croscopic agents. And, in a sense, it already, all along, was a conglomerate
of bacteria and other microorganisms, which actively partook in the life
of the rat when the animal was, biologically speaking, alive. In vital ma-
terialism there is no point of pure stillness, and a quivering can be traced
down to the atomic level; hence everything is in a state of constant be-
coming. In this sense, Bennett’s vital materialism has substantial similari-
ties to Karen Barad’s agential realism and its desire to collapse traditional
notions of animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic. Avoiding an
intrinsically hierarchical ordering of things is, according to Bennett, the
essential prerequisite for the possibility of opening up space for forms of
ethical practice. But what type of ethical practices can emerge when ani-
mal life is, at least discursively, ontologically aligned with that of a discarded
glove or a bottle cap?
In Harman’s conception, flowers, stars, wild animals, pirate ships, and
copper mines have all been equally undermined in the pre-Socratic pe-
riod, by the implicit ontological dependency they bore to the fundamental
elements of the cosmos. Harman is critical of this approach because it de-
fines the perspectives of new materialism—a philosophy he does not agree
with.^18 The preoccupation that objects can be either relentlessly under-
mined or unnecessarily overmined establishes the degree of metaphysical
essentialism characterizing Harman’s object-oriented ontology.^19 He thus