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.
Tristan Garcia is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon and an award-winning novelist. He is the author of La vie intense: Une obsession moderne, translated into English as The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Forme et objet. Un traité des choses (PUF, 2011), translated into English as Form and Object: A Treatise on Things (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). His other philosophical works include L’Image and Nous. His fictional works include Les cordelettes de Browser, En l’absence de classement final and Mémoires de la jungle. In 2008, he received the Prix de Flore for La meilleure part des hommes, translated into English as Hate: A Romance.
Abigail RayAlexander is Assistant Professor of French at Kennesaw State University
Christopher RayAlexander is an independent scholar
Jon Cogburn is Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. He is co-translator of The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession. Together with Mark Ohm, he is the co-translator of Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object, and is the author of Garcian Meditations: The Dialectics of Persistence in Form and Object (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
Tristan Garcia is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon III and an award-winning novelist. He is the author of
La vie intense: Une obsession moderne, translated into English as
The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and
Forme et objet. Un traité des choses (PUF, 2011), translated into English as
Form and Object: A Treatise on Things (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). His other philosophical works include
L'Image and
Nous. His fictional works include
Les cordelettes de Browser,
En l'absence de classement final and
Mémoires de la jungle. In 2008, he received the Prix de Flore for
La meilleure part des hommes, translated into English as
Hate: A Romance.
Abigail RayAlexander is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Southern Indiana.
Christopher RayAlexander is Adjunct Professor of Spanish at the University of Southern Indiana.
Jon Cogburn is Associate Professor pf Philosophy at Louisiana State University. Together with Mark Ohm, he is the co-translator of Tristan Garcia's
Form and Object: A Treatise on Things (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), and is the author of
Garcian Meditations: The Dialectics of Persistence in Form and Object (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
