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Xenotaph:

On the Phylogenesis and Will of Calcium Carbonate.

Dorian Z. Bell | 2026.

Preordenar ahora / Preorder now.

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Xenotaph: On the Phylogenesis and Will of Calcium Carbonate traces the strange life of putatively dead matter —concrete, limestone, calcium carbonate— as it organizes worlds, architectures, ecologies, and meanings. It follows how materials that predate us and will outlast us fold into metabolic loops, political abstractions, machine logics, and traumatic repetitions, sedimenting into the carbonaceous grammar of the Anthropocene.

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From cathedral vaults to ribosomes, from karst to capital, from machine learning circuits to prion misfolding, Xenotaph maps a shared ontology of processes that escalate, replicate, occlude, and dissolve. Concrete becomes not just a substance but an evolutionary strategy, a hyperobject whose surface-area appetites and entropic compulsions shape cities, climates, and forms of thought. What emerges is a theory of nonlife behaving as life, a mineral epistemology in which architectures learn, images ossify, and information mutates; a theory of the world’s ongoing lithification; an exploration of how matter learns, dreams, scars, and builds through us.​​

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