Form and Object: A Treatise on Things

by Tristan Garcia, Mark Allan Ohm (Translator), Jon Cogburn (Translator)

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

488 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2011

About the author

Tristan Garcia is French philosopher and novelist.

Reviews

[Avşar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd urge everyone to read it if you haven't already done so. I can't guarantee that you'd like it. He's writing with the simplicity of a Classical philosopher but this sophistication does not come from the structure of his sentences but his thought process. The main statement is simple. A thing is the difference between what comprehends it and what it comprehends (comprehension in its widest sense). What follows, however, is very sophisticated and thought-provoking. When I put Garcia, Morton, Bryant, Harman, DeLanda hand in hand in my mind, I arrive at a very fresh, somewhat deterministic and fatalistic at times, well hard to explain, but in overall a very wide, encompassing and inclusive perspective about life, the universe and everything. And yes, the answer is forty-two!

"I am in a city. I am in a society. I am in a culture. I am in atoms and molecules. I am in the perceptual field of someone who looks at me and who judges me. I am in my flesh. I am in evolution. I am in history. I am in a square metre. I am in unity. I am in baggy clothing. But I am not in myself."

[Brian Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very rigorous and nearly analytic approach to finding, defining and situating things apart from us, and flying against the "flow" theorists such as Deleuze, Massumi and Latour to insist on the givenness of things out there. Fascinating, revealing, but not an easy read. Not as much fun I'd say as Deleuze & Co either, but important, ironically, in the necessary move from theory to things. Thinging. But likely will not finish it; it’s process is an incarnation of an analytic philosophy. It sits in a stack under the night table.