Garcia's Paradox

The most important concept in Book I of Tristan Garcia’s Forme et objet: Un traité des choses is per-haps without importance, “n’importe quoi” (“anything”).1 In an ordinary, exclamative sense, the expression “c’est n’importe quoi!” may translate as “that’s bullshit!” or “that’s rubbish!” and so on. In this sense, “n’importe quoi” is close to “nothing.” But when I say “that’s bullshit!” something characterized as “n’importe quoi” is not absolutely nothing since having the property of bullshit is at least something, however much disapprobation we might bring to bear. Like Heidegger’s in-famous discussion of “das Nichts” (“the Nothing”) Garcia’s usage both deviates substantially from colloquial French and cleverly combines the quantificational sense of the phrase (“for all x”) and something more denotational and name-like.