Is Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Nature a Vital Materialism?

Abstract Jane Bennett has developed a distinctive form of materialism that she terms ‘vital materialism.’ This ontology serves as the foundation for the ecological politics she advances in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). In this work, Bennett offers critical assessments of several earlier philosophers of nature, among them Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose conception of nature she regards as akin to her own. My paper examines the extent and limits of this kinship by comparing Bennett’s vital materialism with the ontology articulated in Merleau-Ponty’s Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1956–1960) —lectures that laid the groundwork for his final book, The Visible and the Invisible . To determine whether Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of nature may be understood as a form of materialism, I also analyze the interpretations that both Bennett and Merleau-Ponty offer of the philosophies of nature proposed by Immanuel Kant, Hans Driesch, and Henri Bergson.