Form and Object: A Treaty of Things, a fairly systematic treaty, which according to Graham Harman (2012) already started when Garcia was a teenager. Underlying this ambitious metaphysical project, the young metaphysician unfolds his theory systematically and concisely like his medieval precursors, except there is no place for God in this system. At most, one can admit that God is something. God can be more than something, and then it departs from the formal to the objective. But when God becomes an object, it is already limited and hence contradicts what God is. Form and object are the two key concepts that also act as two conceptual tools to separate different realities, as well as logical operators to navigate among things. Form for Garcia doesn’t designate geographical forms, but rather formal relations. Form thus has no relation to object (p. 147). However, to really understand the significance of this work, it is necessary to read what the author has published after the appearance of this book in 2011 in France. I refer here to two resources, one is a seminar that Garcia gave at the École Normal Supérieure in 2012, and the other is his epilogue to the recent book of the philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Algèbre de la Tragédie (see Garcia, 2014).
The author presents his critique in the first sentence of Form and Object: ‘our time is perhaps the time of an epidemic of things … a kind of “thingly” contamination of the present’ (p. 1). This critique is clearer in his 2012 talk, in which this ouvrage is presented as an attempt to lead us out of the 20th-century philosophical paradigm, namely thingification. Garcia (2012) has five streams of philosophy in mind: (1) the dialectical tradition that fights against the reification of things; …