A Dialogue between Graham Harman and Tristan Garcia

We are very pleased to welcome two special guests who will be having a special dialogue. For the next hour and fifteen minutes, we will talk about things.Things and objects - as Noortje Marres has just shown1 - are traditionally only half of what philosophy is about; half of the duo of the subject and the object; the human and the thing. In Graham Harman’s words, philosophy traditionally had a ‘human-world duopoly’2, a dual monarchy of human and world, a ‘Habsburg metaphysics’3 forever incapable of considering humans as ‘just one kind of entity among trillions of others’,4 and equally incapable of considering what things do when there’s no humans around. Objects are pushed from the centre stage to the periphery of philosophy, as human consciousness lays a claim to total power.