Tristan Garcia: What is something? (6.10.14)

Abstract: As­su­ming that the con­cept of “so­me­thing” is the wea­k­est pos­si­ble de­ter­mi­na­ti­on of being, Tris­tan Gar­cia will ar­gue that “so­me­thing” is what is in­cep­ted by thin­king when it is ex­cep­ted by thin­king; it is so weak, that even its ne­ga­ti­on turns out to be its af­fir­ma­ti­on.Tris­tan Gar­cia will argue that the ono­lo­gi­cal mo­del he de­fends in his book “Form and Object -A treatise on Things” is a way to think about the wea­k­est pos­si­ble so­me­thing and he will dis­tin­gu­ish it from other con­tem­pora­ry spe­cu­la­ti­ve mo­dels and ob­ject-ori­en­ted on­to­lo­gies.

That on­to­lo­gy is turning up into so­me­thing ever­y­thing that was be­low “so­me­thing­ness” (an at­tri­bu­te, a non-exis­tent thing, a con­tra­dic­to­ry thing), and turning down into so­me­thing ever­y­thing that was bey­ond “so­me­thing­ness” (a sub­stan­ce, a per­son, the sa­cred).

Tris­tan Gar­cia will give a glim­pse in that ra­di­cal on­to­lo­gy, strip­ping all en­t­i­ties of their de­ter­mi­na­ti­ons, in­ten­si­ty or depth, not to pro­du­ce an ef­fect of uni­ver­sal equi­va­lence, but to find an end to the end­less li­be­ral on­to­lo­gy of mo­der­ni­ty, and he will sug­gest to con­sider the on­to­lo­gi­cal flatness as a gau­ge to re­co­ver the sen­se of dif­fe­ren­ces bet­ween ob­jects, ex­ten­si­ve re­la­ti­ons and va­ry­ing in­ten­si­ties.

Born in 1981 in Tou­lou­se, Tristan Garcia (Uni­ver­sité de Pi­car­die-Ju­les Ver­ne) en­t­e­red in 2000 the École Nor­ma­le Supéri­eu­re. Af­ter working with Alain Ba­diou, he was awar­ded his PhD for a the­sis on the sub­ject of “re­pre­sen­ta­ti­on” in hu­man arts, which he had writ­ten un­der the su­per­vi­si­on of San­dra Lau­gier. On the same year, he pu­blis­hed his first no­vel, awar­ded by the Flo­re Pri­ze and trans­la­ted in eng­lish un­der the tit­le: Hate: a romance (Fa­ber & Fa­ber, 2011). Working as a teacher on short-time contract in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ami­ens, he con­ti­nued his ca­re­er as a no­ve­list (Memories from the Jungle, 2010; In the absence of final ranking, 2011; Browser’s chords, 2012; Faber. The destroyer, 2013) and he con­duc­ted fur­ther re­se­ar­ches in me­ta­phy­sics, lea­ding to the pu­blis­hing of Form and object. A treatise on things. He wro­te cri­ti­cal es­says about ani­mal suf­fe­ring (We, animals and humans, 2011) or TV se­ries (Six Feet Under. Our destinyless lives, 2012). This year, he took a year-long sab­ba­ti­cal, in or­der to work on a es­say about co­mic books and a new book of phi­lo­so­phy.

This event is part of the se­ries Phi­lo­so­phy of the Web, or­ga­ni­zed by Dr. Yuk Hui, CDC.