Garcia’s book

Just a few pages left to go on Garcia’s Forme et objet, which I had to stop reading for awhile due to my lecture commitments. It’s an excellent piece of work that will take awhile to digest. Along with his cheerful attention to precise technical detail, what is especially impressive is his vast reading background in many different disciplines.

In the end, I think some of the promotional material for the book was slightly misleading. It made it sound like the first half of the book (the “flat ontology” half) was just a thought experiment and a kind of reductio ad absurdum. But that’s not the case. The flatness of things as well as the non-flatness of objects both remain operative throughout the book, and the tension between them is one of the primary engines of Garcia’s philosophy.

Another such engine is his refusal of what I would call both the undermining and overmining of things, though Garcia’s terminology is different, and he also views the thing as the difference between what it is made of and the environment it inhabits, whereas for me it is neither of those.

I’ve taken so many notes on the book that writing the review should go relatively quickly, and those who wish to read it will likely see it published in March.

It’s an interesting experience to read a serious, systematic philosophical treatise by someone a generation younger, in part because he makes so many ultra-contemporary references. (Is this the first work of systematic philosophy to cite Kurt Cobain seriously in an effective manner? Probably.)

Garcia writes wonderfully, wears his vast learning lightly, and organizes things well. The second half of the book looks at first like it will be a series of parallel but disconnected meditations on specific topics, but each one leads tightly into the next, as if you were reading Hegel’s Phenomenology (whereas the very difficult first half of the book reminded me of the Science of Logic).

And as I mentioned a month or so ago, there is the following difference between the styles of Garcia and Meillassoux. The preferred style for Meillassoux is ultra-economical, saying things only once and wasting no energy. But Garcia’s style is more like that of a classroom teacher. He repeats each lesson multiple times to make sure you get it. That’s a large part of the reason why the book is so long. But don’t be intimidated by the length, because Garcia’s authorial voice is as warm and friendly as it is talented; indeed, Garcia in person is also just as warm and friendly as he is talented.