Waste could be said to be one of the universal conditions of human existence, albeit one most often kept at bay or on the fringes of awareness. Waste: On the Limits of Human Life looks at its subject within the long perspective necessary to come to terms with how it has existed as a shapeshifting presence that seems to attach itself to human life at every turn, in every age and epoch.
Read MoreOn Garbage
A philosophy of the worthless, the condemned, the discarded.
‘There is such a fine Montaignesque scope to On Garbage ... [a] little masterpiece ... Scanlan [is] an essayist of the first order […] for those who wonder how the species that rises to the horrendous occasions of September 11, 2001, or the recent tsunami, searching for body parts at Fresh Kills Landfill or sorting through corpses for signs of life; how the same human kind could look away from famine and holocaust, Rwanda and Darfur, Scanlan’s inquiries cast some light among the shadows in the dark. Like a wide-eyed miner up from the underworld, what he tenders in On Garbage looks like gold.' — Thomas Lynch, The Times
Read MoreMemory
Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar probes the nature of a phenomenon we all too easily associate with inner, mental life, and reveals it to be both the source and consequence of the ways we are always remaking the external world as our home.
‘Scanlan argues that the digital revolution and . . . the surfeit of available past experience [it produces] threatens to overwhelm the present […] Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar poses a challenge to connect historical accounts of the reductive focus on individual memory as recall in the neurosciences to these broader sociocultural meanings of memory.’ — Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2015.
Read MoreAesthetic Fatigue
George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time elaborates an idea of “aesthetic fatigue” that might serve to encapsulate much of what, in this volume, seems to be characteristic of waste — its relation to time, to energy, to modernity’s desire for evermore perfect designs and forms of living — and to why we discard the past and the stuff that once adorned our world.
Overfamiliarity, Kubler suggests, makes us tired of the way the world looks; it makes the world itself look tired. “Waste,” as this book aims to show, is a multifaceted phenomenon …
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