"Seeking Attention explores the essential but elusive nature of attention through a fresh lens. Drawing inspiration from Simone Weil's assertion that 'attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,' this book brings attention into focus through a novel collection of short 'portraits' that each examine how archetypal figures—like the detective, the fan, the therapist, the parent, and the lover—engage with attention in unique ways.
● Accessible and Thought-Provoking: Written in an approachable style, this book offers an introduction to the growing field of attention studies, sparking new reflections on how we pay attention.
● Diverse Archetypes: Each figure represents a different approach to attention—highlighting its blind spots, failures, and occasional triumphs—prompting listeners to reflect on their own habits.
● A Phenomenology of Attention: Through these portraits, listeners are invited to rethink their understanding of attention, noticing how it shapes the world around them.
● Addressing the 'Industrial-Distraction Complex': Offering alternative models for true presence, Seeking Attention encourages multi-sensory awareness as a powerful counter to our age of distraction."
"'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."
