Michael Marder > Quotes

“humans are nothing but dust looking through dust at dust.”
― Michael Marder, Dust

“Nothing is outdated where there is no date to speak of. Dust is the newold or the oldnew, a zone of death and birth, including that of a (dancing) star.”
― Michael Marder, Dust

“Dust shows that space, traversed by barely noticeable vibrations and morsels of things, is not empty and warns us against equating it to a vacuum. It substantiates the philosophical position of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who ridiculed the thesis that a void existed in nature and who held that even microscopic units of water and air contained intricate worlds lodged within worlds within worlds. But, instead of focusing our gazes on itself, on the uncanny microcosms it houses, dust foregrounds the space it occupies. In the state of maximum exposure, it retreats from our grasp. In spite of being noticed and seen, it functions as a sign that points toward a reality outside it.”
― Michael Marder, Dust

“On every continent we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial.”
― Michael Marder, Dust

“On the one hand, we pass the slowly elapsing, nearly still time; on the other, we experience time itself as ineluctably passing, the moment entirely swallowed up by the past before it has had a chance to make itself known.”
― Michael Marder, Philosophy for Passengers

“Thinking that our physical dwellings can be free of dust, if only for a short stretch of time, we hold onto an unarticulated belief that we, too, can become pure spirits and purge ourselves of all material trappings, first and foremost among them—the embodied mind.”
― Michael Marder, Dust

“Through its recovered luminosity, the shades and textures of things show themselves as they are. Dusting is a material-phenomenological trope of the enlightenment enacting a veritable “reduction” of the sediments that conceal the real, the sediments intervening between the subject of perception and the perceived object. It discloses the façades of furniture and of everything else it cares for, so as to get to the kernel of what is, which is not some hidden inner essence of things, but their countenance—their first look.”
― Michael Marder, Dust

“Dust specks are the quintessential nomads wandering through the immensity of space, time, and sense.”
― Michael Marder, Dust

“Dust flakes hovering in a ray of light (say, under a lit lamp) reveal that ray, its extent and direction, along with our lived space, never as transparent as we believe”
― Michael Marder, Dust