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Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treaty of Things, trans. Jon
Cogburn and Mark Allan Ohm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2014. ISBN 978 0748681495 (hbk), 978 0748681501 (pbk)
on the intensity of thinking and affect of things; and (5) the pragmatism that
prioritises effects and consequences of things. For Garcia, these five schools
belong to modernity and dominate the 20th century.
In the epilogue to Kacems book, we find an enemy in what he calls ontological
liberalism. The problem of liberalism presents itself as a contradiction. On
the one hand, liberalism wants to liberate things from any rule that limits
them; on the other hand, the liberalism that we have seen in the 20th
century is either liberal or neoliberal, and always tends to set up rules that
allow certain beings to be more liberal than the other. The contradiction
of liberalism has to be overcome, not through the development of critique,
but with a new metaphysical foundation that brings it to an end. Here is
the question posed by Garcia (2014: 287): instead of opposing a critical
thinking with strong ontological constraints against the liberal ontology, is
it possible to oppose a thinking with an ontological constraint weaker than
the liberal ontology?
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us, but when we quantify the form, for example through temporal division,
it is no longer a thing but an object:
By fixing the limits to this matter and form, by thinking that a thing
is composed of atoms, for example, and that a thing has a geometric
form, one substitutes a certain limit (a geometric, spatial pattern) in
place of the form (the world). And we pass from the formal to the
objective. (p. 138)
The flat world is not one deprived of possibility, but rather serves the
possibility of its manifestation. We see a division that Garcia has set up,
which presents some oppositions to his metaphysical projects. Things
are formal, the world is flat; objects are hierarchical, and the universe is
accumulative. In the flat world of things, there is an absolute equality (but
not equivalence). Hence we can understand that the formal is dedicated to
the world of things, the objective to the universe of objects. The formal is
the possibility for objective, but also what is beyond the objective, like the
universe that gives life but is also able to take it away. It is clearer when
Garcia writes beneath the smallest and beyond the biggest, it is not an
objective problem, but a problem of things and world, and therefore of
formal knowledge (p. 163). But the formal world is neither an energetic
world nor a world of intensity, which individuates itself when certain
thresholds are reached. The formal world is one that has a lack of intensity
and force. They are, because they are something.
In the second part of the book, the author engages with concepts of other
thinkers such as Mausss gift economy, Marxs class, McTaggarts eternal
time, Benoists Bolzano, etc. However, these seem to be rather quick
descriptions of vast categories such as culture, economy, technics, human,
while it remains to be explained why these categories but not others are
chosen to demonstrate his metaphysics. The author wanted to demonstrate
the construction of these concepts and hence to draw our attention back to
the flat world, and to what he calls de-determination (Garcia, 2014: 288). Let
us take an example of the chapter Economy of Objects, in which Garcia went
back to the utilitarian tradition of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and the
anti-utilitarian tradition of Mauss, George Bataille, etc. This reflection can be
understood as the authors intention to connect his philosophy with current
discourse. However, although these names serve as short-cuts to certain
questions, these concepts prevent the author from further developing his
own original ideas.
In the epilogue to Kacems book, Garcia re-defines a critical task for
metaphysics in contrast to critique, in the sense of political economy and
the Frankfurt School. He distinguishes the task of critique as deceleration,
from his own approach which functions as acceleration by abstraction
(Garcia, 2014: 282285). The link between this acceleration by abstraction
still needs to be distinguished from the accelerationism which has gained
popularity since 2013. In the conceptualisation of Garcia, the metaphysical
Books
Yuk Hui
Institut fr Kultur und sthetik Digitaler Medien,
Leuphana University Lneburg, Germany
[email: yuk.hui@leuphana.de]