Tristan Garcia

Memories from the Jungle is set in an unspecified future in which Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by pollution and war. Most humans live in orbital stations surrounding the globe, while only animals still survive on the African continent, along with a few scientists who study them in a kind of zoo and experimental laboratory. Doogie, a chimpanzee, has been raised as a human by a zoological researcher, Gardner Evans, and his daughter, Janet. Doogie is no ordinary chimpanzee: gifted with an exceptional intelligence (perhaps the result of a scientific experiment), he has been taught a fairly sophisticated version of the human language, is capable of human emotions such as love and jealousy, and has a highly developed understanding of human behavior. After an accident to the spacecraft that was bringing him back to Earth from an orbital station, Doogie finds himself alone in the jungle. In order to survive, he must rediscover the very animal nature he has been trained to reject.

As a philosopher and a novelist, Tristan Garcia inhabits two worlds, metaphysics and literary fiction, like an amphibious creature moving between the land and the sea, breathing in both air and water. He is drawn to metaphysics because, as he puts it, metaphysics is the edge of the abyss of thought, the unstable frontier of indeterminacy where thinking is no longer constrained by the principles of logic or the law of non-contradiction. Metaphysics seeks to describe the world from outside one’s own point of view. It aims at an ecstatic reconstruction of what keeps us locked up in our conditions, in our time and place, here among the living, with our subjectivities and within our situations. It gives us an idea of all constraints from a point of view that posits the possible absence of the constraint of having a point of view. The ambition of this slender book – which is at the same time a concise introduction to Garcia’s work and thought – is to help us grasp and transform the conditions of our existence by paying equal attention to what is ending and what is just beginning, to the dusk and to the dawn. Until we cannot hold our breath any longer.

As a philosopher and a novelist, Tristan Garcia inhabits two worlds, metaphysics and literary fiction, like an amphibious creature moving between the land and the sea, breathing in both air and water. He is drawn to metaphysics because, as he puts it, metaphysics is the edge of the abyss of thought, the unstable frontier of indeterminacy where thinking is no longer constrained by the principles of logic or the law of non-contradiction. Metaphysics seeks to describe the world from outside one’s own point of view. It aims at an ecstatic reconstruction of what keeps us locked up in our conditions, in our time and place, here among the living, with our subjectivities and within our situations. It gives us an idea of all constraints from a point of view that posits the possible absence of the constraint of having a point of view. The ambition of this slender book – which is at the same time a concise introduction to Garcia’s work and thought – is to help us grasp and transform the conditions of our existence by paying equal attention to what is ending and what is just beginning, to the dusk and to the dawn. Until we cannot hold our breath any longer.

Throughout the history of human societies, the question of 'we' has always entailed the question of 'us and them', the reconciliation of which can either give birth to or mark the end of a politics. Tristan Garcia's radical historicisation of the ways we have imagined ourselves is more than a commentary on the dynamics of representation in a given society. This work is a rigorous engagement with the history of humanity's attempts at being collectively. For fans of The Life Intense, the first volume in the Letting Be series, We Ourselves is the next step in the development of Garcia's thought, but for those who have not read it, it also stands alone. Garcia provides a methodological framework that critically reinvigorates our dreams of the society to come and clears the way for the return to ontology in Letting Be III.

Throughout the history of human societies, the question of 'we' has always entailed the question of 'us and them', the reconciliation of which can either give birth to or mark the end of a politics. Tristan Garcia's radical historicisation of the ways we have imagined ourselves is more than a commentary on the dynamics of representation in a given society. This work is a rigorous engagement with the history of humanity's attempts at being collectively. For fans of The Life Intense, the first volume in the Letting Be series, We Ourselves is the next step in the development of Garcia's thought, but for those who have not read it, it also stands alone. Garcia provides a methodological framework that critically reinvigorates our dreams of the society to come and clears the way for the return to ontology in Letting Be III.

Proposing a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions.This volume gathers and expands upon the results of the research project "Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions," held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that conceptualizes the exhibition as both an aesthetic and an epistemic site. ContributorsEtienne Chambaud, Elitza Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Rapha l Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Sami Khatib, Jeremy Lecomte, St phane Lojkine, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, Jo o Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anna-Sophie Springer, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Etienne Turpin, Kim West, Charles Wolfe

Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience with ever greater intensity. We are enticed to try exotic flavors and smells; urged to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences; pushed to engage in extreme sports and recreational drugs all in the pursuit of some new, unheard-of intensity.Tristan Garcia argues that such intensity rarely lives up to its promise. It always comes at a price: one that defines the ethical predicament of contemporary life.The notion of intensity was the hidden key to Garcia's landmark book Form and Object. In The Life Intense, the first part of his ambitious Letting Be trilogy, he begins to develop it in detail. This first book focuses on ethics; the forthcoming volumes will be devoted to politics and then metaphysics.

Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience with ever greater intensity. We are enticed to try exotic flavors and smells; urged to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences; pushed to engage in extreme sports and recreational drugs all in the pursuit of some new, unheard-of intensity.Tristan Garcia argues that such intensity rarely lives up to its promise. It always comes at a price: one that defines the ethical predicament of contemporary life.The notion of intensity was the hidden key to Garcia's landmark book Form and Object. In The Life Intense, the first part of his ambitious Letting Be trilogy, he begins to develop it in detail. This first book focuses on ethics; the forthcoming volumes will be devoted to politics and then metaphysics.

The burrow is subjected to fantasy because we usually only know its shape or its threshold ; we have to imagine the rest. Symbolically, this also applies to the Maginot Line : everyone has already heard about it but not many people can describe it. Its name echoes like a receptacle for fantasies. The shapes of its bunkers match this symbolic dimension. Through his pictures, Alexandre Guirkinger wanted to share his fascination for this extraordinary relic whose modernity is already old. The chosen and photographed bunkers are those the shape, situation and contours give the picture something more than the material storing of a boundary : a kind of science fiction scenery, a trace of land art, a modernist architecture, a contemporary geoglyph. The gap between the abundance of the relics of the line and the few contemporary representations of the latter offer an exciting playfield to question our relationship to landscape, to the boundary, to the limit. This is the starting point of Tristan Garcia’s short story. Text in French.

This is a shockingly new view of 'things' that will revolutionise contemporary ontological debates about substance. What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposed derivative nature of objects and in so doing provides deep insights about the world and our place in it. Tristan Garcia's original and systematic formal ontology of things strips them of any determination, intensity or depth. From this radical ontological poverty, he develops encyclopaedic regional ontologies of objects. By covering topics as diverse as the universe, events, time, the living, animals, human beings, representation, arts and rules, culture, history, political economy, values, classes, genders, ages of life and death, he shows that speculative metaphysics and ontology are alive and well. It proposes a systematic philosophy essential to the development of metaphysics, the ontology of objects and speculative realism. It combines the analytic and continental traditions, and will appeal to philosophers working on either side. It applies his metaphysics to philosophically charged practical issues such as vegetarianism, animal rights, the nature of representation, death, culture and history.

What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposedly derivative nature of objects and in so doing gives deep insights into the world and our place in it. Garcia's original and systematic formal ontology of things strips them of any determination, intensity or depth. From this radical ontological poverty, he develops encyclopaedic regional ontologies of objects. By covering topics as diverse as the universe, events, time, the living, animals, human beings, representation, arts and rules, culture, history, political economy, values, classes, genders, ages of life and death, he shows that speculative metaphysics and ontology are alive and well.

In a controversial first novel that took the French literary world by storm and won the Prix de Flore, Tristan Garcia uses sex, friendships, and love affairs to show what happens to people when political ideals--Marxism, gay rights, sexual liberation, nationalism--come to an end. As Elizabeth Levallois, a cultural journalist, looks back on this decade and on the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Paris, a drama unfolds--one in which love turns to hate and fidelity turns to betrayal, in both affairs of the heart and politics. With great verve and ingenuity, Garcia lays claim to an era that promised freedom as never before, and he paints an indelible, sharp, but sympathetic portrait of intellectuals lost in the age of MTV.