They urge us to open the eyes of the mind or of the soul and finally to begin living, even if we are already in the concluding phases of our biological lives, abiding for the first time with truth or with God. Metaphysical and religious systems scream in our ears that we must wake up from the nightmare of our individual and collective lives while it is not too late, while the time for repentance and conversion has not yet run out. It takes over the movement, production, and reproduction of world-destruction, wrecking the very being-world of the world. For the most part and albeit technically alive, we are dying there, dismembered, thrown out, trashed, alienated from our alienation, coming to love it or altogether indifferent, apathetic, no longer involved, anaesthetized with pharmaceutically and ideologically manufactured painkillers. Living on a dump, we are moved, produced, and reproduced by the dump, as by ourselves. What do the words we live comprehend? 1 How to apprehend them without arresting their referent? According to the preeminent ancient sensibility, they mean “we animate and are animated, move and are moved” 2 in the modern paradigm, they are likely to convey that we produce and reproduce (ourselves).

We live and die on a dump of ideas, bodies, dreams, materials, snippets of relations, sound bites and memes, decontextualized and dehistoricized, produced as waste, clipped, isolated and thrown together in a massive jumble in the wake of what used to be a world. And the information without form that sometimes lends a name to postindustrial societies, economies, and ways of crafting knowledge is but a brushstroke in its portrait, the still or already unframed world-picture. In an ontologically toxic state, the meaning of being is being dumped.ĭumping, ontological toxicity, light and sound pollution, individuation/nonindividuation, metabolism, metaphysics A Global Dump Disrupting metabolism at every scrambled register of existence, it waxes into what Marder calls “ontological toxicity,” the mangled parts of the dump that do not pass through and out of being and, in not passing, warrant the annihilation, the rapid passing away, of all else. Toxicity targets our bodily tissues, senses, and minds, not to mention our worlds, without individuating us in this targeting, as indifferent and random as the global dump that nourishes it. On his reading, multiple levels of existence-from the psychic to the physiological, from the environmental-elemental to the planetary-are being converted into a dump, a massive and still growing hodgepodge of industrial and consumer by-products and emissions shards of metaphysical ideas and theological dreams radioactive materials light, sound, and other modes of sensory pollution pesticides and herbicides and so forth.

In this article, Michael Marder interprets the “toxic flood” we are living or dying through as a global dump.

Dust by Michael Marder