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. So argues Michael Marder in his 2020 book, Dump Philosophy. In this conversation, Marder discusses the scope of his account of “dumpology”; the nihilistic, depressing affect that pervades the book and his wish to come up with a language for speaking about the sublime, uncanny and devastating transformation through which we are living; the possibility of emerging forms of solidarity between humans and non-human forms of life like animals and plants; and the irony of humans recognizing ourselves in the Anthropocene.

MICHAEL MARDER is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory and phenomenology.

SOFIA LEMOS is a curator and writer. She is Curator at TBA21 – Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Her writings on contemporary art and culture have featured in publications such as Art Agenda, Document Journal, Spike and MOUSSE as well as in several catalogues and monographs.

Sofia Lemos (SL): I am interested in the intersecting trajectories in your work. On the one hand, you have explored in depth the idea of plant thinking and being, of vegetality, but another strand of your work deals with ideas related to energy and entropy, dust and decay. Your work seems to create a delicate balance, or perhaps a generative friction, between decay and regeneration, hopefulness and nihilism. Would you agree with this statement, and where would your recent book Dump Philosophy fit within these trajectories?

Michael Marder (MM): Dump Philosophy is the other pole of vegetable thinking or plant thinking. In the dump, the very connection between growth and decay has been undone, and it is this that allows the dump to grow by accretion, because it is an accumulation of things that do not decay, decompose, or open the space and the time for future growth. Plants, of course, do the exact opposite: they are the very living bonds between growth and decay. There is no vegetable growth without decay, and there is no decay without vegetable growth.