We work to prevent the 'foreign work' of allergic reaction. But to displace 'matter out of place' is to obey its own anarchic directive! We labor under the misconception that, in the course of cleaning or dusting, we expel the undesirable from the dwelling and, with this sweepingly decisive gesture, reassert the law of the house, its economy. 'The daily fight against dust on the invisible domestic front is fated to displace and redistribute rather than eliminate it. Marder's thoughts on dusting had me wondering whether his place is covered in sheets of dust and the corners of his abode populated by dust bunnies. the misplaced reactions of spirit out of place to matter out of place.' -59 Those with allergies won't be happy to read that after several pages of philosophical argument, allergies have been reduced to:

fugacious refers to something that is quick to disappear, fleeting or not lasting very long), the novelty quickly wore off and I began to slowly drown in this pretentious waffle. While it was fun to go and look up words from the book I didn't know, (e.g. Just as dust will continue accumulating after every attempt to get rid of it, so prejudices and preconceptions will keep accruing after analysis (no matter how radical) shakes received ideas to the core.' 'What I like about the allegory of dusting is that it elucidates how critique, reduction, or deconstruction cannot achieve their objectives once and for all. I tried to keep up, but the more philosophers he quoted from (Jean Paul-Sartre, Husserl, Leibniz, Plato, Nietzsche, Kant and Aristotle to name drop a few) and the more philosophical his writing became, the more my eyes rolled back into my skull.

'To take the correlation between the dust that we are and the dust outside us at face value is to jump into a thicket of metaphysical issues.' Marder makes it clear early on that he is going to be examining dust through the eyes of a philosopher. I hoped he was going to touch on cool topics like: space dust, coal dust, 911 dust, dust storms, asbestos and cosmic dust, but alas, you'll find none of that here. I thought Marder was going to give us the science on what dust is, what it is made of, how it varies in different locations, how it travels and settles and our constant efforts to remove it. The series aims to take average items from our everyday lives and explore them in brief for the reader's enjoyment and I was very much looking forward to Dust.

Dust by Michael Marder is the fifth title in my series of book reviews drawn from the Object Lessons series by Bloomsbury Academic.

From the Dust #1 by Michael Mercer