In this talk, I revisit my notion of the ontological dump (defined to a large extent by its heaviness) via the metabolic breakdown that makes itself felt at every level of existence and that is the underside of the extractivist theory and practices of energy. More specifically, I return to the ‘geodump’ of the earth, still divided into its surface and depth. If the relative hospitality of the earth’s surfaces is waning, can its depths still hold the promise of absolute hospitality — which is of a piece with death?

The approach to the Anthropocene, which I have adopted in Dump Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2020), attends to the breakdown of metabolisms at every scale of existence, from the planetary to the micro-organismic. Considered from the perspective of metabolism, differences between materialism and idealism, or the actual and the rational (which turns out to be utterly irrational), fade away. The manner of thinking that worships the metaphysical idol of immutable being and that gives itself a body in the world by inventing and producing barely decomposable materials falls on the side of indigestibility along with these materials themselves. A secure foundation for thought (formal logic, numbers or geometric principles, the One, etc.) spawns the most acute insecurities, be they environmental, political, or existential. The Anthropocene, then, is the name or the misnomer for a global metabolic disorder.

The breakdown of metabolism is, in fact, the breakdown of breakdown and of its opposite, namely of the synthetic capacity. Shreds of ideas and materials clog the milieu where they are and fail to dissolve into it. Both metabolic vectors suffer the consequences: both catabolism and anabolism are affected in thinking and in being, that is to say, in the cognitive operations (not only of the human kind) that rely on analysis and synthesis and in the similarly analytic and synthetic processes within and between organisms, or between organisms and their environment, not forgetting those unfolding in the bodies of the earth, the atmosphere, and the oceans. Mirroring the ideal incorruptibility of metaphysics, the accumulation of unwasting waste testifies to the indigestibility that attains the ontological status as a permutation of being itself in the twenty-first century.

If the Anthropocene is a multi-scalar complex of indigestibility, then, whatever it is, a counter-Anthropocene cannot imply a return to purity — and not only due to the undeniably fictitious nature of such a return. To counter the Anthropocene, what is required is not a clean-up but digestion, with all its messy, “unclean,” perhaps disgusting, deeply material operations. In effect, clean-ups (of oil spills or of household dust, among other things) displace waste at best, and add more to it at worst, when they unleash “forever chemicals” into the environment. They break things down with the help of unbreakable substances, buttressing Aristotle’s thesis about the impossibility of infinite regress and assuming the role of the unmoved movers. Indigestible materials are, oftentimes, the trappings of a squeaky-clean state of being, resistant to metamorphoses, set within impermeable boundaries (whether conceptual or actual). They are the nodes where the dump, lacking any distinctions, reinforces and restages the immutable divisions of metaphysics.

Boundaries are there to guard whomever or whatever is held within them and to be on guard against possible intruders, who represent a threat to the guarded interiority. But the guarding — for or against, for and against — is faced with permanent instability, which is of a piece with different kinds of lives and loves: organismic, ecological, planetary. In thought and in politics, boundaries are not, in the first place, matters of security, nor, even, of purification that may descend to the violence of ethnic cleansing, but of metabolism: of swallowing up or expelling, receiving or rejecting, assimilating or keeping at bay, saying yes or no, at times without resorting to words. To fulfil their metabolic function, they must be porous, expanding and contracting, osmotically permeable. Such boundaries will be the signposts of conditional hospitality that could be “universal,” as in the third definitive article of Kant’s “Perpetual Piece” dealing with “Bedingungen der allgemeinen Hospitalität [the conditions of universal hospitality],”[1] but not absolute, not unconditional or “without reserve,” which is how Derrida reads the same text.[2] When boundaries harden, seeking to stabilise what is essentially unstable, they stop working as they should and the extreme inhospitality they convey to the outside backfires, resulting in purges and civil strife inside the bounded entity. When they are loosened to the point of dissolving, they also cease promoting metabolic exchanges in a swing from the indigestion to the diarrhea of being.

Kant’s “cosmopolitan right” is “a right of resort” Besuchsrecht, not to be conflated with “the right of a guest,” Gastrecht. It is the entitlement of all human beings “to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to the communal possession of the earth’s surface.”[3] Much has been written about the colonial background for the formulation of cosmopolitan right and its “equivocal or hypocritical promise,” as Derrida characterises it.[4] Less obvious is the idea that underlying the “right of resort” is “the right of a guest” extended to all living beings by the earth itself. The “communal possession of the earth’s surface” a priori separates this surface from the depth, where aquifers, precious minerals, fossils, and more recent dead bodies are kept. In erasing, at least potentially, the boundaries that traverse the face of the earth, Kant reaffirms the boundary between its surface and depth, hinting at another sort of metabolism — of life and death, of vegetal growth from decay, of economies fed by fuels and metals mined from the bowels of the earth. Trifling as it appears, this is a point of entry into the hospitality of the earth.

The earth receives everything and everyone on its surface and further still, in its cosmic vicinities, all the way to the outer rim of its gravitational field. And it also accepts organic and inorganic matter in itself, with the proviso that its surface- and space-based hospitality is calculable and limited, while the hospitality of terrestrial depth is unlimited and, perhaps, incalculable. In the Homeric hymn to Demeter, Hades is invoked twice as “the hospitable one,” polydektêi (polydectes) (Dem. 9) and polydegmôn (Dem. 17) [5] “the one who receives many.” The absolute and unconditional hospitality of the underworld contrasts the relative and conditional hospitality of cosmopolitan right, tethered to the earth’s surface. From its depths, the earth equally claims all for itself with an elemental claim that does away with possession and appropriation, both individual and communal.

The abolition of the logic of property underlies and undermines this very logic, even if the gesture is not entirely negative: the bowels of the earth (where elemental and planetary metabolisms take place) are the sites of another claim and another mode of reception in an act of hiding, encryption, concealment — as described in Hesiod’s Works and Days — albeit without appropriation.[6] The claim of the earth is that of matter itself, whereby terrestrial depths are understood in terms of depth as such, not admitting any light, which is shed only on the surface, where eidetic structures are situated.[7] It is, then, the claim of depth, later on (indeed, already in Aristotle) diluted in the receptivity of matter interpreted as its passivity, rather than a welcoming and a holding outside the confines of an identity and the logic of appropriation.

The ironic opening of Kant’s essay on “Perpetual Peace” is unsurpassable for any serious attempt to think through the hospitality of the earth, more so than Kant himself imagined. [8] Of particular importance is the title (which is also the main idea and the ideal, the desideratum and the aspiration) of his influential text is borrowed from a Dutch innkeeper: “‘THE PERPETUAL PEACE’—a Dutch innkeeper once put this satirical inscription on his signboard, along with a picture of the graveyard [Ob diese satirische Überschrift auf dem Schilde jenes holländischen Gastwirts, worauf ein Kirchhof gemalt war]. We shall not trouble to ask whether it applies to men in general, or particularly to heads of state (who can never have enough of war), or only to the philosophers who blissfully dream of perpetual peace.”[9] The age-old response to the question Kant mentions but does not actually ask is that hospitality in the earth is reserved for all, dissolving every manner of boundary, categorial distinction, or line of demarcation that are more appropriate to the surface of the earth. Absolute, unconditional hospitality in excess of the cosmopolitan “right of resort” comes through in this image of perpetual peace, as uncanny as it is ancient, which Kant immediately discards.

Philosophically, the combined effect of Homer and Kant is explosive: it conveys that absolute, unconditional hospitality is not only achievable in death, but that it is also suffused with the power of death, dissolving organismic forms and razing difference as such, since the only difference that remains is related to rates of decay. It is in this key that one should hear Derrida’s (and, to a lesser extent, Levinas’s) insistence on “hospitality in the unconditional and absolute sense we have been attempting to think […] since last year and to distinguish in a non-oppositional difference from hospitality in the ordinary sense, unconditional hospitality, if there is any.” [10] The last — conditional — addition to the qualification of unconditional hospitality “if there is any” plays with the sense of this hospitality as quasi-transcendental, not presenting any empirical evidence of its existence but making possible “hospitality in the ordinary sense.” In so doing, it rightly places absolute hospitality and the transcendental or quasi-transcendental sphere on the side of death, of the earth’s depths welcoming the many on an equal footing, as in Homer’s reference to Hades — the subterranean abode and the deity ruling over it, the difference between the gloomy place and the god erased — with the words polydectes and polydegmôn.

Absolutisation, the undoing of various conditions and conditionalities, the collapse or dissolution of boundaries: all these events are, in one way or another, tied to death, rather than to some abstract philosophical concept, which, as such a concept, may well be a sublimated reflection of death. The sense of death as a welcome inheres in the handover of a body that was alive and that no longer maintains its boundaries intact, in relative homeostasis, to the elements (in the case of terrestrial plants, animals, and human corpses — depending on burial rites — to the earth; in the case of marine animals and aquatic plants to bodies of water; in yet other cases, keeping cultural variations in mind, to fire [11] and to the air, as in Zoroastrian “sky burials,” also practiced in parts of China and Mongolia, in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and parts of India). But since the earth symbolically (and, increasingly, materially) stands in for and suffuses all the other elements, elemental hospitality at death is the hospitality of the earth. It is a becoming-geological that predates the Anthropocene.

There are two forms of becoming-geological in the twenty-first century. The first, as old as humankind itself and as old, too, as organic terrestrial existence, has to do with the gradual decomposition of a dead body, a corpse, into the earth, with which it merges and from which it eventually grows to be indistinguishable. The second, much more recent, involves the byproducts of industrial techno-bodies, encrusted in geological strata, as well as, in the shape of microscopic fragments or nanoparticles, in organic tissues of all that lives.

The two forms of becoming-geological are mutually incompatible. The corpse decays into the earth, whereas the residues of the techno-body are, by and large, non-decomposable. The first becoming is part of elemental metabolism; the second, through massive sedimentation and accretion of materials, chokes off metabolic transformations in the physiology of organisms and in the upper strata of the planet. The standoff not only pits two forms of becoming-geological against each other, but also leads to a confrontation between a becoming and an anti-becoming, between a planetary metabolism and that which threatens to bring it to a grinding halt.

It would be probably more correct to designate our bodies’ decomposition into the soil as their becoming-earth in radical hospitality where the guest becomes the host, while the persistent layer of the non-decomposable vestiges of our industries would refer to the becoming-geological proper. The accuracy of this specification is, nevertheless, somewhat dubious.

For one, some parts of bodily remains may resist decomposition and get fossilised. In particular, the skeleton and, along with it, microplastics, heavy metals, and radioactive isotopes archived bodies and preserved in the soil, instead of rotting into it. For another, what geology adds to the Greek for earth (gē) — what it articulates geo- with — is logos, which, though conventionally translated as study, names more pertinently a way of joining together, an assembly, or an articulation (from the Greek verb legein, to gather, to put together). Geology deals with the articulations of the earth, with its own constitution and its combinations with other elements, the articulations that are as temporal as they are spatial (in fact, each of these aspects is expressed through the other). In turn, the anti-becoming of anthropogenic debris is both geological and anti-geological, since, in its being added to the planetary strata, in its articulation with other layers of the earth, it disarticulates the earth both internally, with respect to itself, and externally, for example, with regard to the atmosphere and the oceans. The suffusion of the rest of the elements with the earth is both the most radical form and the end of its hospitality: from an all-receptive host, it transitions to an ever-present guest, lodged there where it has been least expected.

Bio

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz. An author of eleven books and over a hundred academic articles, he is a specialist in phenomenology, political philosophy, and environmental thought. His most recent books include The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (2024), Eco-Freud (2025), Metamorphoses Reimagined (2025), and, with Anais Tondeur, Fiori di fuoco (2025).