My political strategy is indirect because its target is not the macro-level politics of laws, policy, institutional change but the micro-politics of sensibility-formation.

In the book, I also suggest that a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages could translate into a national politics that was not so focused around a juridical model of moral responsibility, blame, and punishment. The hope is that the desire for scapegoats would be lessened as public recognition of the distributed nature of agency increased, and that politics would take on a less moralistic and a more pragmatic (in Dewey’s sense of problem-solving) cast.

- Jane Bennett, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 

as found at the interview with Peter Gratton on his blog

how to approach and contemplate corpses

Visiting cemeteries is for the sake of seeing human death. Cemeteries in the past weren't like they are today. Unburied bodies were scattered all over the place — old bodies and new, scattered around like logs. When you saw them, you'd see clear evidence with your own eyes.

The Buddha gave instructions on how to visit a cemetery. Go from the upwind side, he said, not from the downwind side. Don't begin by looking at a new corpse. Look at the old ones first. Keep contemplating the theme of your meditation and gradually move on until you know that the mind has enough mindfulness and discernment to contemplate a new corpse. Only then should you move on to a new corpse — because a new corpse still has regular features. If the person who just died had beautiful features, it might cause desire to flare up, and you'd end up with an out-of-the-ordinary meditation theme, which is why you have to be careful.

The Buddha taught stage by stage, to visit the cemetery at intervals or in steps, and to contemplate it at intervals in keeping with your capabilities. He wouldn't have you go storming right in, for that wouldn't be fitting. He taught all the steps. Don't be in a hurry to contemplate a corpse that hasn't fallen apart or been bitten, a corpse that is still new and hasn't swollen or grown foul. Don't be in a hurry to approach such a corpse. And be especially careful with a corpse of the opposite sex — that's what he said — until the mind is capable enough in its contemplation. Then you can contemplate anything.

Once we've contemplated death outside until we gain clear evidence, we then turn inward to contemplate the death in our own body until we catch on to the principle within the mind. Then the external cemetery gradually becomes unnecessary, because we've caught on to the principle within ourselves and don't need to rely on anything outside. We contemplate our body to see it as a cemetery just like the external cemetery, both while it's alive and after it dies. We can compare each aspect with the outside, and the mind gradually runs out of problems of its own accord.

- Venerable Acariya Maha Boowa Ñanasampanno

from the talk "Principles in the Practice, Principles in the Heart" 

given January 19, 1977

as found in 

Things as They Are: A Collection of Talks on the Training of the Mind 

(translated from the Thai by Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

These findings bolster my long-standing conviction that the theory of therapeutic catharsis—which dates back to Aristotle and was a cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis—is wrong. If anything, expressing aggression, anger, fear, hatred—whether with a psychotherapist, spouse, friend, office-mate, neighbor, stranger—makes you more aggressive, angry, fearful, hateful, not less.

- John Horgan, Sept 20 2010, in Scientific American

Apādakehi me mettaṃ,
mettaṃ dvipādakehi me;
catuppadehi me mettaṃ,
mettaṃ bahuppadehi me.

I have love for the footless

for the bipeds too I have love

I have love for those with four feet

for the many-footed I have love

Aṅguttara Nikāya 4.67

Jeremy Bentham on the Rights of Animals

The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

-- fr Chapter XVII "Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence"

as found in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 

1789

the exploration of suffering as the first science

Those who invented neither powder nor compass
those who could harness neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither the seas nor the sky
but who know in its most minute corners the land of suffering
....[who] yield, captivated, to the essence of things

-- Aimé Césaire

fr. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land 

(trans Eshleman & Smith)

the actual practice of ethical behaviors

"...to move selves from the endorsement of ethical principles to the actual practice of ethical behaviors. ...Some in political theory, perhaps most notably Nancy Fraser in Justice Interruptus, criticized this turn as a retreat to soft, psycho-cultural issues of identity at the expense of the hard, political issues of economic justice, environmental sustainability, human rights, or democratic governance. Others (I am in this camp) replied that the bodily disciplines through which ethical sensibilities and social relations are formed and reformed are /themselves/ political and constitute a whole (underexplored) field of 'micropolitics' without which any principle or policy risks being just a bunch of words. There will be no greening of the economy, no redistribition of wealth, no enforcement or extension of rights without human dispositions, moods, and cultural ensembles hospitable to these effects." 

-- Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

...all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy.... In the actual world -- the painful kingdom of time and place -- dwell care, and canker, and fear....[G]rief clings to names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.

RWE, fr. "Love"

Omar Pérez as translated by Kristin Dykstra, bilingual edition (Shearsman 2010)

dryfitting the deck of brian's boat

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