As a novelist, Tristan Garcia has received widespread recognition and awards, including the Prix de Flore. But it is his most recent philosophical work, Forme et objet: Un traité des choses, that secures his place as one of the most significant systematic philosophers in contemporary France.

Garcia's philosophical prose is lucid, in general presenting no special problems for the translator. However, a few key technical terms and phrases are so central to his system that any non-idiomatic English translation would invariably mislead the reader. Thus, explaining our translational choices requires some presentation of the system itself.

In English, 'comprehension' almost always denotes an epistemic state where one or more people understand some object or proposition. But this is not the case with respect to Garcia's use of ' compréhension '. For Garcia, one object comprehends another object whenever the second object can be said, in any way, to be contained in or encompassed by the first object. The closest English language usage occurs in mathematical set theory, where an axiom of comprehension defines new sets in terms of the properties of their members. But even the set-theoretic notion is merely one instance of Garcia's broader concept. Consider: