Tristan Garcia – författare

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 the 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Der junge Faber war cool, schlau, ein bisschen gefährlich und ziemlich unnahbar. Das Idol der ganzen Schule und ihre erste große Liebe. Doch als Madeleine ihn in seiner armseligen Hütte in den Pyrenäen wiederfindet, erkennt sie ihn kaum wieder. Er ist verwahrlost und offenbar verrückt. Etwas größenwahnsinnig war er schon als Jugendlicher, ein verführerischer Rebell, mitunter buchstäblich besessen. Mit Basile bildeten sie damals ein unzertrennliches Trio, träumten von Gerechtigkeit und Glück und kämpften einen gefährlichen Kampf. Das alles ist fünfzehn Jahre her. Madeleine nimmt Faber also mit zurück an den Ort ihrer Jugend, wo sie noch immer lebt, versucht gemeinsam mit Basile, ihn zu retten – doch in Wahrheit geht es um Rache. Bald schon um Leben und Tod. Was haben die drei einander angetan?Dieser große Roman erzählt von der Suche nach Halt und Zukunft, von Träumen und Verführung, von der Jugend und ihren Idealen. Der raffiniert gebaute Text ist selbst bis zur letzten Seite auf der Suche nach Fabers Geheimnis.

Es geschieht sieben Mal: Er stirbt und wird im selben Moment wieder geboren. Immer neu. Stets der Gleiche. Immer wieder kehrt der Ich-Erzähler nach dem Tod an den Anfangspunkt zurück, behält aber all seine früheren Leben in Erinnerung, alle Irrtümer und Erfolge. Jedes Mal muss er wieder neu laufen und sprechen lernen, warten bis das Blut kommt, um dann nach Paris gebracht zu werden. Dort trifft er Fran, der ein Mittel zur Blutstillung besitzt, ihn stets aufs Neue erwartet, erkennt und begleitet. Wie alles andere auch, ist diese Freundschaft sieben Mal gleich und doch grundverschieden. Sieben Mal liebt der Erzähler außerdem hingebungsvoll die gleiche, ja dieselbe Frau mit dem seltsamen Namen: Hardy.Wie wäre es, noch mal ganz von vorn anfangen zu können? Und ist dem, was Leben ausmacht eher wissenschaftlich oder politisch, religiös, sinnlich oder künstlerisch auf die Spur zu kommen?Dieser waghalsige Roman erzählt spielerisch und humorvoll von Zufall und Schicksal und befragt die Möglichkeit von (politischer) Veränderung überhaupt.Ein maßloses Buch, sinnlich und klug, das schwindlig macht und lange zu denken gibt …

«La vida intensa» ofrece un análisis crítico al ideal moderno de vivir todas nuestras experiencias al límite, el cual puede resultar agotador y llevar a la sociedad a la frustración. Vivir con intensidad se ha convertido en el ideal de nuestra sociedad: cualquier argumento de venta se basa en la búsqueda de sensaciones fuertes -desde los juegos de azar a la seducción, el amor pasional o la fe exaltada en eventos sociales- que nos despierten y arranquen de la monotonía, del automatismo y, por ende, de la existencia banal. En efecto, hace mucho tiempo que la sociedad liberal occidental se dirige al fenómeno de la intensidad con la finalidad de convertirnos en personas cuyo sentido existencial sea la intensificación de todas nuestras funciones vitales.Sin embargo, la continua búsqueda de la emoción puede resultar agotadora: el deseo aumenta hasta convertirse en adicción y, luego, en frustración. En este sentido, la presente obra tiene por objetivo analizar la condición en la que se encuentra nuestro devenir moderno para hacer una lectura crítica de este horizonte insuperable en el que se han situado nuestros valores de fetichización de la intensidad.