Haunting seems to happen where enchantment has been banned or sup-
pressed. The gods are replaced by ghosts and they disturb us with hollow
sounds. Ghosts are not the things they once were, but nagging forms of
memory that refuse to let the past go away. They are unfinished business,
terrifying proof that the past is not yet over.
—DAVID MORGAN, “ENCHANTMENT, DISENCHANTMENT, RE-ENCHANTMENT”
A life thus names a restless activeness, a destructive-creative force-pres-
ence that does not coincide fully with any specific body. A life tears the
fabric of the actual without ever coming fully “out” in a person, place, or
thing. A life points to what A Thousand Plateaus describes as “matter-
movement” or “matter-energy,” a “matter in variation that enters assem-
blages and leaves them.” A life is a vitality proper not to any individual but
to “pure immanence,” or that protean swarm that is not actual though it
is real: “A life contains only virtuals. It is made of virtualities.”
—JANE BENNETT, VIBRANT MATTER: A POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF THINGS
I
n 2001, Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments,
Crossings, and Ethics incorporated ideas similar to those explored by
Gablik. Bennet’s critique of the Anthropocene ultimately positioned it
as a time in which secularization, rationalization, and scientization have re-
CODA
Toward New Mythologies—the Ritual,
the Sacrifice, the Interconnectedness
