INTRODUCTIONwitnesses of this alternative register, Bennett notes, would be Bergson, with his vision of
the universe as ‘‘a nontotalizable sum, a ‘whole that is not given,’ because its evolution
producesnewmembers and thus an ever-changing array of effects’’ (p. 781n.5), and Han-
nah Arendt, who entertains a notion of nonlinear patterns of agency, for example, by
distinguishing between ‘‘causes,’’ which ‘‘entail singular, stable, and masterful initiators
of effects,’’ and ‘‘sources,’’ which ‘‘invoke a complex, mobile, and heteronomous enjoiner
of forces’’ (p. 611).
In sum, Bennett insists on a certain ineliminable ‘‘mystery’’ in human agency, which
fully justifies our inquiry into possible ‘‘family resemblances’’ or ‘‘isomorphical opera-
tions’’ in the comparison with nonhuman agents. Moreover, such inquiry would have to
extend to conceptualizing the total movement of agents as well. Bennett introduces the
Chinese concept ofshito capture ‘‘the style, energy, propensity, trajectory, or e ́lan inher-
ent to a specific arrangement of things. Originally a word used in military strategy.. .shi
names the dynamic force emanating from a spatiotemporal configuration rather from any
particular element within it.’’ The assemblage in question, Bennett continues, is ‘‘vibra-
tory,’’ asshicharacterizes ‘‘an open whole where both the membership changes over time
and the members themselves undergo internal alteration’’ (p. 613).
If philosophers, cultural critics, social scientists, and policy makers were more aware
of these intangible aspects of agency and agencies, they might realize that they characterize
the mood and style of individual actants and collective milieus in ways that can be either
‘‘obvious or subtle.’’ As Bennett concludes,shimight ‘‘at one time consist in the mild and
ephemeral effluence of good vibes, and at another in a more dramatic force capable of
engendering a philosophical or political movement—as it did in the cafes of Sartre and
Beauvoir’s Paris and in the Islamist schools in Pakistan’’ (pp. 613–14). What such insight
might yield is what Bennett calls ‘‘a cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capaci-
ties’’ (p. 615). The latter would enable a far more ‘‘hesitant attitude’’ when the question
of ‘‘blame’’ is at issue, detaching ethics from moralism, even though it will not necessarily
still the need for moral outrage, where and when appropriate. And this, ultimately, would
be a matter of political judgment.
Khatib finds yet another entry into to the question of whether there is a place for
theology in the post-secular age. Her essay examines one of the most influential examples
of the antireligious critique of theological concepts by analyzing twentieth-century surre-
alism in the context of Mircea Eliade’s notion of the hierophany—the manifestation of
the sacred in everyday reality—in an attempt to resituate surrealist thought within a new,
post-secular narrative of redemption. Taking the surrealist interest in the reenchantment
of everyday life as its starting point, her essay investigates the movement’s central theoreti-
cal preoccupations not from the standpoint of art but from the standpoint of interpreta-
tion, recasting surrealism as a philosophy of immanence, in which surreality appears as a
redemptive potential found in the objects of the everyday world.
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