Sad Planets

By: Dominic Pettman, Eugene Thacker

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

"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?

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.

©2024 Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker (P)2025 Highbridge Audio

Philosophy's Prince of Darkness Returns

If you like the Thacker "Horror of Philosophy" books--the first available as an audiobook on this site--you'll enjoy this very diverting illumination of existential darkness and its universe-spanning short chapters. Would have loved for E.T. to be one of my professors long ago. He valiantly challenges depression's army of the dead with their own devices. The material is not insultingly Woke, though of course we get to hear about colonialism and racism as if they started just yesterday. (What about today's s.-traffic slaves, E.T.? No, Kämmy Dü didn't mention them in her campaign, but she looked out for the folks on Jeff's list.) Besides this poetic work of modern philosophizing, Thacker is releasing all three of the Horror of Philosophy books in one updated volume. I actually have the separate books on different ebook platforms, so I'll have to revisit the horrors on Kindle!