Waste: A Philosophy of Things

Why are people so interested in what they and others throw away? This book shows how this interest in what we discard is far from new — it is integral to how we make build and describe our lived environment. As this wide-ranging new study reveals waste has been a polarizing topic for millennia and has been treated as a rich resource by artists writers philosophers and architects. Drawing on the works of Giorgio Agamben T.S. Eliot Jacques Derrida Martin Heidegger James Joyce Bruno Latour and many others Waste: A Philosophy of Things investigates the complexities of waste in sculpture literature and architecture. It traces a new philosophy of things from the ancient to the modern and will be of interest to those working in cultural and literary studies archaeology architecture and continental philosophy.