The Life Intense
A Modern Obsession
Tristan Garcia
Translated by Abigail RayAlexander, Christopher RayAlexander, Jon Cogburn
- Read an extract from The Life Intense, 'What electricity has done to thought', on the Edinburgh University Press blog
Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience with ever greater intensity. We are enticed to try exotic flavours 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 two books look at politics and metaphysics respectively.
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
An erudite study [that] argues that our appetite for new thrills is leaving us indifferent to the values of subtlety and compromise.
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.
