Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience all things with ever greater intensity. We are enticed to try exotic flavors and smells, urged to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences, and pushed to engage in extreme sports and recreational drugs: all in the name of achieving 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, but was not developed there in detail. In The Life Intense, he gives us the first part of his ambitious Letting Be trilogy on the role of intensity. The focus here is on ethics, with the remaining volumes devoted to politics and then metaphysics.

Tristan Garcia is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon.

Abigail RayAlexander is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Southern Indiana.
Christopher RayAlexander is Adjunct Professor of Spanish at the University of Southern Indiana.
Jon Cogburn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University.