Who Made the Planet Sad? Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker's 'Sad Planets'

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Sad PlanetsDominic Pettman, Eugene Thacker“Everything is sad,”
wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human
experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom
attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever
weeping the “tears of things”?
 
In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker
explore some of the key “negative affects” – both eternal and
emergent – associated with climate change, environmental
destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth
something so obvious that it has gone largely unnoticed: the
question of how we should feel about climate change. Between the
information gathered by planetary sensors and the simple act of
breathing the air, new unsettling moods are produced for which we
currently lack an adequate language. Should we feel grief over
the loss of our planet? Or is the strange feeling of witnessing
mass extinction an indicator that the planet was never “ours” to
begin with? Sad Planets explores this relationship between our
all-too-human melancholia and a more impersonal sorrow, nestled
in the heart of the cosmic elements.

Spanning a wide range of topics – from the history of cosmology
to the “existential threat” of climate change – this book is a
reckoning with the limits of human existence and comprehension.
As Pettman and Thacker observe, never before have we known so
much about the planet and the cosmos, and yet never before have
we felt so estranged from that same planet, to say nothing of the
stars beyond.


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