I was never sure why Debra’s stubbornness fascinated me until I came across the work of Jane Bennett, a philosopher and political theorist at Johns Hopkins. A few years ago, while delivering a lecture, Bennett played clips from “Hoarders,” commenting on them in detail. She is sympathetic to people like Debra, partly because, like the hoarders themselves, she is focussed on the hoard. She has philosophical questions about it. Why are these objects so alluring? What are they “trying” to do? We tend to think of the show’s hoards as inert, attributing blame, influence, and the possibility of redemption to the human beings who create them. But what if the hoard, as Bennett asked in her lecture, has more agency than that? What if these piles of junk exert some power of their own? Bennett, Jane (2014), "Systems and Things: A Reply to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton", in Grusin, Richard (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press - forthcoming. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brain Massumi. (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis). Coole, D. and Frost, S. (Eds.) (2010) NewMaterialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. (Duke University Press: Durham). Bennett, Jane; Loenhart, Klaus K. (2011), "Vibrant matter - zero landscape: interview with Jane Bennett", in Bélanger, Pierre (ed.), GAM 07: Zero landscape: unfolding active agencies of landscape (Graz Architektur Magazin Graz Architecture Magazine) (German and English Edition), Wein New York: Fakultät für Architektur Technische Universität Graz, ISBN 9783709105368 Also printed as: Bennett, Jane; Loenhart, Klaus K. (19 October 2011). "Vibrant matter - zero landscape: interview with Jane Bennett". Eurozine.

Bennett, Jane (2009), "Thing-Power and an Ecological Sublime", in White, Luke; Pajaczkowska, Claire (eds.), The Sublime Now, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp.24–35, ISBN 9781443813020 Bennett, Jane (2004), "Approaches to Contemporary Political Theory", in Kukathas, Chandran; Gaus, Gerald F. (eds.), Handbook of Political Theory, London Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE, pp.46–56, ISBN 9780761967873 Bennett, Jane (2012), "Thing-Power", in Elkins, Jeremy; Norris, Andrew (eds.), Truth and Democracy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.154–158, ISBN 9780812243796 How elating I found reading Vibrant Matter, with its eloquent vision of an ethics of the nonhuman. Bennett argues for a perceptual style open to the appearance of thing-power: we who study the texts and objects of a remote age can get behind that, I think. Indeed, for those of us for whom time doesn't simply pass into lostness we are already behind it, still feeling the power of history's things, which didn't know they were supposed to be still. “ — Jeffrey J. Cohen, In the Middle blog

What’s a Rich Text element?

Bennett, J. (1994a) Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and State in a Post- Hegelian Era. (New York University Press: New York). Bennett's work considers ontological ideas about the relationship between humans and 'things', what she calls "vital materialism":

i do respect the goal of it and obviously it's important to consider nonhuman things in issues of politics and rights and ethics blablabla How’s it in?” Bennett asked. She turned to me. “Try to pull it out!” I leaned down, grabbed an orange handful, and yanked. It wouldn’t budge. Bennett, Jane; Shapiro, Michael J. (2002), "Introduction", in Bennett, Jane; Shapiro, Michael J. (eds.), The politics of moralizing, New York: Routledge, pp.1–10, ISBN 9780415934787 Bennett, Jane (Winter 2001). "Commodity fetishism and commodity enchantment". Theory & Event. 5 (1). doi: 10.1353/tae.2001.0006. S2CID 144361800. Forthcoming) Bennett, Jane (2019). "Out for a walk". Zeitschrift für Kultur und Medienforschung. 10: 93–105. doi: 10.28937/1000108235. S2CID 213271406.

This past fall, I met Bennett at a coffee shop near the Johns Hopkins campus. Sixty-five, with coiffed silver hair and cat’s-eye glasses, she sat at a table near the window reading the Zhuangzi, one of the two most important texts of Taoism, the Chinese school of thought that emphasizes living in harmony with the world. “The coffee isn’t very good here, but the people are nice,” she told me, conspiratorially. She took out her phone. “I have to show you a picture.” She turned the screen toward me, revealing a photo of two dead rats lying on the pavement—an image at odds with her kindly-neighbor looks. “I was walking by the university, and this is what I found,” she said. I leaned closer. The rats, who had drowned in a rainstorm, lay in artful counterpoint, as though posing for a still-life. KKL: In distinction to other materialist thinkers, your objects unfold thing-power foremost in the state of assemblage, which unfolds through a contingency of their co-presence. In Vibrant Matter, you argue that “in this [state of] assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics”. 6 At one point, when you argue for a culture of assemblages –“for a cognizant of our embeddedness in a natural-cultural-technological assemblage” 7– I have to think of landscape (in its multi-dimensionality between matter and idea) as interface for this proposed practice. One example of a vital materialism of our contemporary landscape is your account of infrastructure. Vibrant Matter will reward readers by opening many fields of inquiry that require responses. The reconceptualization of the material world that Vibrant Matter represents is a meaningful step in the direction of reformulating many of the debates within environmental philosophy that continue to retain the vestiges of overt dualism and its less obvious manifestation in the subject-object distinction.” — Bryan E. Bannon, Environmental Philosophy