Sad Planets

By: Dominic Pettman, Eugene Thacker

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Paperback | 22 July 2024 | Edition Number 1

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488 Pages

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21.5 x 13.5 x 2.5

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“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.

Industry Reviews

"This brilliant text is a Minima Moralia for the twenty-first century."
Claire Colebrook, author of Death of the Posthuman

"This book is timely and important. It speaks to the affects surrounding climate change, from fear and dread to complacency or helplessness, even anger."
Kelly Oliver, author of Earth and World

"From the two words of its title, Sad Planets generates a rich constellation of interrelated ideas. Its mini-essays, lively and eloquent, are unexpectedly exhilarating despite their apocalyptic subject. This is a book that will transform its readers."
Peter Schwenger, author of The Tears of Things

"Sad Planets is both brilliant and original. It works through massive swathes of contemporary culture, and finds in it all massive reasons for us to be melancholy or depressed… perhaps the real lesson of the book is that there is no way to ever fully deal with our overall reality. But by translating this dilemma from an intellectual one into an emotional one – sadness as the best response we are capable of – Sad Planets not only contributes powerfully to the project anthrodecentering, perhaps the most urgent intellectual task of the early 21st century, but also establishes itself alongside the greatest texts about melancholia in the English language."
Steven Shaviro

"Provocative, wry, and eloquent,... Sad Planets muses on interplanetary topics to convey a sense of global urgency and inchoate loss."
Foreword

"Strangely beautiful and bracingly bleak, this successfully renders what could have been a perverse intellectual exercise into a work of genuine feeling."
Publishers Weekly

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