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Get to know the most ubiquitous, persistent, and hybrid trace of things whence you came and whither you shall return!

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"). This book treats one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena, showing how it can provide a key to thinking about existence, community, and justice today.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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1. Dusting
2. A Phenomenology of Dust
3. Being, Dust, and Time
4. Allergic Reactions
5. A Community of Remnants
6. Just Dust
7. DustArt
Notes
Index

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In this inspiring and thought-provoking book, Michael Marder develops a fascinating phenomenology of dust, showing how, in a world overwhelmed by learned dust and dusty words, it is dust itself that teaches us about how to bring thoughts and words back to the things themselves. In Dust, we find a gem of philosophical prose. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Professor of Philosophy, Södertörn Univerity, Sweden

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Marder, Michael
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 Thought and 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).

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