The Life Intense
A Modern Obsession
Tristan Garcia author Jon Cogburn translator Abigail RayAlexander translator Christopher RayAlexander translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:6th Sep '18
Should be back in stock very soon
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.
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 Ecological
ISBN: 9781474437127
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 248g
192 pages