Jane Bennett and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Toward a Phenomenology of Enchantment

This paper engages in a comparative study between the vital materialism in the works of political theorist Jane Bennett (primarily, The Enchantment of Modern Life) and the ontology of flesh in the late works of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty ("The Intertwining-The Chiasm," "Eye and Mind"). There are striking echoes in their descriptions of the aesthetic experience of enchantment. I show how both thinkers reject philosophical accounts of form as extra-material. The reconfigured matter-form relationship in each onto-story leads to a phenomenology of enchantment with the world. The stakes of the latter are ethical and political for Bennett, who argues in The Enchantment of Modern Life that the mood of enchantment also applies to fetishized commodities and is necessary for more just social, political, and economic reconfigurations. Finally, I gesture towards a Merleau-Pontean intervention on this question through his analogy between works of art and commodities in "Marxism and Philosophy." Can the ontology of flesh and its implicit theory of perception help us understand both commodity fetishism and enchantment? In reading Bennett and Merleau-Ponty alongside each other on the phenomenology of enchantment with worldly objects, my hope is to find grounds for drawing on the rich phenomenology of perception found in Merleau-Ponty's late works as a resource for conversations around political aesthetics more broadly.