HENT DE VRIESism’’—and its related notions such as ‘‘time,’’ ‘‘culture,’’ ‘‘event,’’ ‘‘life,’’ and ‘‘kinship’’—
can warrant a rich concept of responsibility and accountability. In a critical discussion of
Kant and the phenomenological tradition, Bennett counters that view, suggesting that
‘‘figurations of agency centered around the rational, intentional human subject—even
considered as an aspirational ideal—understate the ontological diversity of actants’’ (p.
607). Reversing the transcendental argument of both traditions, she states that ‘‘even what
has been considered the purest locus of agency—reflective, intentional human conscious-
ness—is from the first moment of its emergence constituted by the interplay of human
and nonhuman materialities’’ (p. 608).
What are the consequences of this view for the problem that interests us here—the
fate and potential of political theologies? Is it the ‘‘pantheist’’ view, now elaborated for
the age of mechanical reproduction? Or does it merely spell out the ecological claim that
‘‘all things are interconnected,’’ with the added insight that there ‘‘was never a time when
human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhu-
manity,’’ and that the present, with its ‘‘higher degree of infrastructural and technological
complexity’’ has, for us, only ‘‘rendered this harder to deny’’ (p. 614)?
For one thing, Bennett’s materialist monism complicates the naı ̈ve conception of
agency, human and other, that has dominated debates in philosophy and the social sci-
ences: ‘‘persons are always engaged in an intricate dance with nonhumans, with the urg-
ings, tendencies, and pressures of other bodies, including air masses, minerals,
microorganisms, and, for some people, the forces of fate, divine will, or karma.’’ Invoking
the figure of the assemblage, Bennett suspects, might help us to spell out the forms and
dynamics of agency in more plausible ways than has been done so far: ‘‘The active power
of assemblages is concealed under the rubric of (social) structures, (cultural) contexts,
(religious) settings, (economic) climates, or (environmental) conditions—terms that de-
note passive backgrounds or, at most, states of affairs whose sole power is the negative
one of constraint or resistance.’’ Again, analyzing them (and also, e.g., governmental
institutions, public spaces, collective practices, architectural products, artifacts, and vi-
ruses) with a different conceptual approach reveals ‘‘spirited actants.’’ Doing so, she sug-
gests, is not necessarily to fall back into the ‘‘mortal sins of anthropomorphism, vitalism,
or fetishism’’ (pp. 608–9). Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Bennett thinks of
materiality as having a vitality distinct from the ‘‘passivity of an object,’’ and, with refer-
ence to Adorno, she invokesconstellationas a way of describing the ‘‘sticky web’’ (p. 609)
through which moving elements of agency produce, no, create forms of life-matter that
in turn spirit ever newer elements into existence, without preconceived plan and hence
without predictable outcome: a ‘‘cascade of becomings,’’ to cite a further Deleuzian
theme, one Bennett creatively relates to Derrida’s conception of ‘‘messianicity,’’ that is to
say, ‘‘thepromissoryquality of a claim, image, or object.’’ These motifs, she concludes,
enable us to rethink the implications of ‘‘an open-ended kind of directionality, a direc-
tionality delinked from the strict logic of purpose or intentionality’’ (pp. 610–11). Other
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