Dump Philosophy

Ranging across philosophy, theology, ecology, psychology, and art, in Dump PhilosophyMichael Marder argues that the earth, along with everything that lives and thinks on it, is at an advanced stage of being converted into a dump for industrial output and its by-products feeding consumerism and its excesses.
Every day, scientific studies, media reports, and first-hand accounts of the rapidly deteriorating state of the environment hit us with a growing and disconcerting force. Trends such as microplastics in water, airborne toxins, topsoil degradation, and dangerous levels of carbon dioxide have upset the delicate ecological balance that has until now been sustaining life on the planet.
Marder's original treatise paints a portrait of the Anthropocene as a global dump which wreaks havoc, causing disease and degrading our sensation, perception, and thinking, so that nuance is lost and ideas are reduced to soundbites in chains of free association. Describing the dump's fundamental characteristics and its effects on the body and the mind, he contemplates wider physiological, social, economic, and environmental metabolisms in the age of dumping, as well as the role of philosophy caught in its crosshairs. While surveying the devastation that is the reality of the twenty-first century, the book provides a frightening and yet intellectually spellbinding glimpse of the future.

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He is the Associate Editor of Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thoughtand the author of The Event of The Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism(2009), Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (2010), Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Phenomena-Critique-Logos: The Project of Critical Phenomenology (2014), and Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015).

Preface: dumped Globality All the world's a dump Mechanics: the fall, massiveness, piling up Falling before and after the death of god Je suis biomasse Antilogos Toward an intellectual history of heaps, piles, and other jumbled things Our polluted senses Toxicity Shitty apocalypse, or scatological eschatology Falling in love and being dumped On the arcane utility of the useless The portrait of a thing as its own wastebasket Dumpology Estamira, esta mira, "this sight" The writing dump Parts of the void In-formation Rameau's nephew for the twenty-first century Dump philosophy, or the task of thinking in the age of dumping