“Jane Bennett has always been interested in reading the ecological from a political point of view and articulating an ecological politics. But this book will be a new moment in how we think about ecology and democracy. For it explains to us not only the possibility of ‘ecological democracy’ but also why a truly democratic personality must be ecological: open and attentive, susceptible to otherness, and welcoming influences. Influx & efflux is a wonderful achievement.” — Branka Arsic, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
“In this remarkable book Jane Bennett shows us just why a capacious sense of influence matters so much to our efforts to shape the circumstances we find ourselves in. Generous, surprising, and beautifully illustrated, influx & efflux resounds as a compelling affirmation of the value of drawing diverse elements and agencies into new lines of thinking and feeling. This book does nothing less than shift the tone and terms of political theory, offering us a vital poetic vocabulary for making more of the world's participation in the political and ecological stances we take.” — Derek P. McCormack, author of Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment
"Arguing for an aspirational rather than a polemical Whitman, Bennett charts a body of work generous, egalitarian, and democratic 'wherein the forces of nonhuman agencies and the ubiquity of stupendous, ethereal influences are acknowledged' (p. 116). Ultimately, she concludes that Whitman’s 'I is creative in that it alters and inflects what is taken in, taken on, taken up' (p. 117). Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." — J. N. Barron, Choice