Dump Philosophy

Ranging across philosophy, theology, ecology, psychology, and art, in Dump Philosophy Michael 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 of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology. He is the author of the Object Lessons title Dust (Bloomsbury, 2016).

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