Dump Philosophy

A Phenomenology of Devastation

Michael Marder

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350170605
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350170629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ecology

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.

Index¹

abstraction here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

abyss here, here

dump as here

of information here

of matter without spirit here

of water here, here, here, here

Adam here

adamah here

Adorno, Theodor here

aerodump here, here, here, here

aesthetics here, here, here, here–here

affinity here–here

Agamben, Giorgio here

algorithms here, here

alterity here, here

amorphous/amorphousness here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

analogy here–here, here, here

of the sun here

animality here, here

Animal Planet here

animism here

Anthropocene here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Anthropocenomania here

anthropos here, here, here

antidumping legislation here–here

Antigone here

apocalypse here, here, here, here, here, here

Aquinas, Thomas here–here

archi-writing here

Arendt, Hannah here, here, here, here, here

Aristotle here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• dedication
• Title
• Contents
• acknowledgements
• 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
• a poetic appendix: elemental laments
• list of illustrations
• note on the images
• notes
• index
• copyright