Architecture of the Possible

Tristan Garcia (Author), Jean-Marie Durand (Author), Christopher RayAlexander (Translated by), Abigail RayAlexander (Translated by), Jon Cogburn (Translated by)

9781509552238, Polity Press

Hardback, published 23 September 2022

153 pages
21.8 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.295 kg

“The primary trait of Tristan Garcia as an author is his consistent freshness: to read him is to press the reset button in your brain and awaken with a new hope. In this book, his most personal so far, he pulls off the impressive feat of reviving the reader's courage while speaking primarily of himself. Such is the disarming modesty of this multi-talented thinker.”
Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture

As a philosopher and a novelist, Tristan Garcia inhabits two worlds, metaphysics and literary fiction, like an amphibious creature moving between the land and the sea, breathing in both air and water. He is drawn to metaphysics because, as he puts it, metaphysics is the edge of the abyss of thought, the unstable frontier of indeterminacy where thinking is no longer constrained by the principles of logic or the law of non-contradiction. Metaphysics seeks to describe the world from outside one’s own point of view. It aims at an ecstatic reconstruction of what keeps us locked up in our conditions, in our time and place, here among the living, with our subjectivities and within our situations. It gives us an idea of all constraints from a point of view that posits the possible absence of the constraint of having a point of view.

Language, Thought, and Fiction

Philosophical Feeling

Philosophical Orientation

Intensification, Extension, Breaking Point

Literature: Ideas in a Body

Models of Concision and Models of Profusion

Childhood and Irenicism

War

Finding a Viewpoint

Solitude

Activists

Nuanced Minds and Rough Minds

Radicalness

The Enemy

Friends

Progress and Movement

The World After

Thinking Saves

Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP]