Books by Tristan Garcia

Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience with ever greater intensity. From flavours and smells to sex, drugs and extreme sports, we are in constant pursuit of some new, unheard-of intensity. Tristan Garcia argues that such intensity rarely lives up to its promise, and always comes at a price.

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. 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.