New materialism is an interdisciplinary, theoretical, and politically committed field of inquiry, emerging roughly at the millennium as part of what may be termed the post-constructionist, ontological, or material turn. New materialism has emerged mainly from the front lines of feminism, philosophy, science studies, and cultural theory, yet it cuts across and is cross-fertilized by both the human and natural sciences. The revival of materialist ontologies has been animated by a productive friction with the linguistic turn and social constructionist frameworks in the critical interrogation of their limitations engendered by the prominence given to language, culture, and representation, which has come at the expense of exploring material and somatic realities beyond their ideological articulations and discursive inscriptions. Important as this ideological vigilance has been for unEarthing and denaturalizing power relations, and whose abiding urgency new materialism does not forego, the emphasis on discourse has compromised inquiry by circumscribing it to the self-contained sphere of sociocultural mediation, whereby an anthropocentric purview and nature-culture dualism, which constructivists sought to deconstruct, is inadvertently reinscribed. This bibliography presents works that explore these themes and intersections.

Jane Bennett, Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, published her awaited book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things in 2010. Her distinctive notion of ‘vibrant matter’ invokes a new and different political imaginary outside the Hegelian and psychoanalytic framework of the subject and object/other relation. Bennett demonstrates that both human and non-human entities (including inorganic matter) are composed of ‘vibrant matter’. In Bennett’s view, matter that is commonly considered to be ‘dead’ such as fossils and stones is not actually dead but very much alive and is constituted by a lively and energetic play of forces. Following a long tradition of thinkers who have sought to decenter ‘the human’ (e.g. Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault), Bennett’s emphasis on non-human matter challenges the ontological privileging of ‘the human’. However, her notion of ‘distributive agency’ creatively affirms the necessity of human embodiment, understood as one site of agency within and across a multiplicity of other material bodies and formations.

Barad elaborates on their philosophy of agential realism, which rethinks the relationship between matter, meaning, and agency. They challenge the traditional view of matter as passive and inert, arguing instead that matter is active and dynamic, imbued with its own capacities to “feel” and “remember” in a way that blurs the boundaries between the human and non-human. Barad draws on feminist theory, quantum physics, and new materialism to suggest that matter is not simply a backdrop for human action but is fundamentally involved in the processes of knowing, relating, and being. Their view encourages a more interconnected, relational understanding of reality where both human and non-human entities are seen as part of a larger, ongoing material-discursive web.

In this article, Morgan Meis investigates the philosophy of Jane Bennett, who argues that the stuff which surrounds us isn’t inert–it has a will of its own.

Thomas Lemke discusses Jane Bennett’s vitalist materialism, which differs significantly from object-oriented ontology’s (OOO) understanding of matter. It puts forward the idea of a comprehensive vitality that undermines traditional ontological and normative divisions and runs through both human and non-human matter. Bennett’s account of “thing-power” provides important elements for designing a posthumanist political theory and goes beyond many conceptual limitations of OOO. However, Lemke argues that her “vital materialism” fails to account for the negative and destructive processes that obstruct and hinder the progressive politics she envisions. She tends to displace political questions by the appeal for a new ethical sensibility. Unfortunately, Bennett offers no convincing argument as to how the “energetics of ethics” is coupled with political dynamics or how the vital politics she advocates translates into a radical change in the contemporary structures of production and consumption.