It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as
enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of
superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to
rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to
experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to
motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory,
philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative
contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the
deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.
As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the
unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She
guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of
enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for
example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology,
advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday
moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of
generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual
refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on
thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx,
Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment
of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old
''narrative of disenchantment, '' one that presents a new ''alter-tale''
that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.
