T. Garcia, Form and object

Formal ontology and the flat world

Paul Livingston

pp. 545-553

in: Continental Philosophy Review 49 (4), 2016.

Abstract

So, there are all these things. On the first page of Tristan Garcia’s bold and far-ranging treatise, the contemporary experience to which it responds is described as that of an “epidemic of things,” a proliferation of the variety and heterogeneity of actual and possible “somethings,” a “‘thingly’ contamination of the present” in which there are always “more and more things” and in which it, accordingly, becomes “increasingly difficult to comprehend them, to be supplementary to them, or to add oneself to oneself at each moment,” lost as one is among “people, physical, natural and artefactual objects, parts of objects, images, qualities, bundles of data, information, words, and ideas…” (p. 1). Garcia is not only the author of this and two other philosophical works, but also an accomplished novelist, having won the prestigious Prix de Flore for his 2008 debut novel, La Meilleure Part des hommes.