Flat ontology and differentiation: in defence of Bennett’s vital materialism, and some thoughts towards decolonial new materialisms for international law

Grear, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2993-1370 2024. Flat ontology and differentiation: in defence of Bennett’s vital materialism, and some thoughts towards decolonial new materialisms for international law. Jones, Emily and Aavidsson, Matilda, eds. International Law and Posthuman Theory, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 60-82.

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the claim that ‘new materialisms’ are insensitive to questions of structural power. Identifying the vital materialism of Jane Bennett as the archetypical target of such critiques, the chapter defends Bennett’s ‘flattened’ ontology from the charge that her work produces a ‘systemic blindness to the inequalities, asymmetries and hierarchies enacted in vital materializations’. The chapter also reflects on the promise of Bennett’s imaginary as a potential bridge towards Indigenous scholarly and activist resistance to the closures and violence of the Eurocentric international legal order. A burning question for posthumanist and new materialist international legal theory is how to avoid replicating colonialities when pressing back against the Euro-modernist onto-epistemology of the current legal order. I position Bennett’s work as a potentially promising contribution towards that vitally urgent critical project.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Law
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032658025
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2024 13:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/147422

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