World and Planet

Spacewhy finds a helpful distinction between world and planet. While these two large round objects may seem similar, they could not, in fact, be more different. The world is the sensible realm made up by society; the world of jobs, cops, traffic jams, fathers, systematic theology, Barbie, the atom bomb, tantric yoga, 9/11, sunsets and so on. A (semi) coherent world bound by laws, constructed from language; the square world, the ad world, the gun world; the epistemé; the superego; the consensual hallucination that we call reality. The planet, by contrast, has by no means been consented to, and yet here we are. It is that unthinkable thing inside of which we find ourselves, and that is ourselves; unknowable by science, undecidable by philosophy. The planet—which is also the body—is unilateral and remains always already immanent to anything we can (consciously) think about it; strange and uncanny, not only because it is radically other than us, but also because it is us, the drive of our most intimate experience (sex and death). The planet pervades the world at every point even while the world hallucinates that it is beyond the planet. The world is precisely the foreclosure of the planet from the symbolic (and so no wonder the biosphere is collapsing). The planet is in the world but the world does not know it.