Tristan Garcia

interview by DONATIEN GRAU
portrait by GIASCO BERTOLI
artworks by THOMAS HIRSCHHORN

At 35, Tristan Garcia is one of the most brilliant, prolific, and original of the new generation of French philosophers. Equally acclaimed as a fiction writer, with novels translated into many languages, and a metaphysical philosopher — his Form and Object has entered the canon, as has his concept of “flat ontology” — he is also a subtle observer of the contemporary world. With his new book, Nous (We, Grasset, 2016), he investigates the field of politics, questioning the global fragmentation into multiple antagonistic identities, replacing Hobbes’ famous “war of all against all” with what he calls “the war of us against us.”

 

DONATIEN GRAU — The first sentence in your book Nous is: “Let us acknowledge that the subject of politics is we.” Is this a…