The Life Intense
A Modern Obsession
Published on 6. September 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
192 pages
978-1-4744-3712-7 (ISBN)
Description
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 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.
Reviews / Votes
An erudite study [that] argues that our appetite for new thrills is leaving us indifferent to the values of subtlety and compromise. -- Tim Adams * The Guardian * Tristan Garcia demonstrates how at the most encompassing level of contemporary social roles lives the Romantic consumerist, forever seeking spiritually heightened experiences: what he like Pater calls intensity. We're all Baudelaires now. Ecological ethics and politics ignores this at its peril: all that talk of efficiency and anti-consumerism seems to want to bypass this inconvenient truth. An ecological future must voyage through intensity...and for that we need maps. Garcia establishes some key coordinates for such a mission. -- Timothy Morton, author of Being EcologicalMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
254 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4744-3712-7 (9781474437127)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
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 traite 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 Memoires 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).
Content
Series Editor's Preface
Translators' Introduction
Introduction
1. An Image
2. An idea
3. A Concept
4. A moral ideal
5. An ethical ideal
6. An opposing concept
7. An opposing idea
8. An opposing image
Bibliography
Index
Translators' Introduction
Introduction
1. An Image
2. An idea
3. A Concept
4. A moral ideal
5. An ethical ideal
6. An opposing concept
7. An opposing idea
8. An opposing image
Bibliography
Index