Jane Bennett: Nature as Process and Sweeping as Acting
Wednesday | June 18, 2025 | 10:30-11:15
Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
Must the idea of connection between a physics and an ethics be abandoned with the acknowledgement that nature is not providential or anthropocentric, but indifferent to human happiness, salvation, or survival? This paper explores an ethical practice of attending to (and mimicking) nature conceived as perpetual process and an essentially cloudy/dusty source. It takes up the daoist text Zhuangzi to pursue a pragmatic version of the idea that it is valuable to attune to the style of creativity characteristic of broad-scale natural-physical processes. One such practice is sweeping dust with a broom. Zhuangzi suggests that this small act repeats the style of dao, the ur-process of (what can be imperfectly translated as) nature. Sweeping, as action that is not an enactment of an intention or quest for a goal set in advance, is a fractal instance of the continuous, creative self-rearrangement of the cosmos. Sweeping considered also as a gateway to the dusty substance of subjectivity.