Surplus Matter

The Anti-Hegel

This was not just the new Hegel: even better, it was the anti-Hegel, deliriously following through on his avowal to chase Spirit (Geist) out of the Humanities (Geistliche Wissenschaften), to celebrate the poetry of materiality and the materiality of poetry. Here was someone who — at last! — had charted the genealogy, or transmission lines, of writing’s interface with bodies, from Sade to Kafka, Marinetti to Pynchon. Most exciting of all, he lucidly and irrefutably articulated something I’d been trying ineptly to persuade people of for years: that Dracula is a book about the Dictaphone.

An extract from Tom McCarthy’s tribute to the late Friedrich Kittler.

Irreparably Thus

What Richter is at pains to foreground is the fact of mediation, the presence, at the very origin and base of every piece, of technologies of mass-production, of repetition. He not only overwrites our perceptual relation to the world by rerouting it through its glitch-ridden mediating screens; he also brings this logic to bear on the history of art.

Tom McCarthy on Gerhard Richter in The Guardian.

On Dodgem Jockeys

Tom reads and discusses a new text on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb: “They [dodgem jockeys] were there at your conception and the universe’s, when circulating atoms deviated and collided.”

Missed Passes, Accidental Ricochets & the Beauty of Corruption

Once you’ve written a book and look back at the process, it’s like the build-up to a goal. You wouldn’t change anything, even the missed passes and accidental ricochets, because they led to what turned out to be the thing.

Tom McCarthy interviewed about C (now out in paperback) in The Guardian.

The Poetic Truth of the Neoliberal Military Project

In this video interview in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, part of a series commemorating “10 years of terror”, Tom McCarthy talks about Bernard Noël’s Le Château de Cène (1969), which he describes as an “obscure pornographic allegory” of the war in Algeria. He goes on to say that “With the Abu Ghraib photos, you don’t need a Bernard Noël to do it. The soldiers themselves are enacting those scenes” that reveal “the poetic truth of the overall neoliberal military project”.

Tom McCarthy at Louisville Conference

Three panels will be devoted to Tom McCarthy’s work at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 February 2012. Tom will be “creative keynote”.

Tom McCarthy in NYC

Tom McCarthy will be reading from/talking about Men in Space at 192 Books on 25 February 2012.

None of it Means Anything

In the books, money both stands for genealogical fakeness and is fake itself (a brilliant scene in The Crab with the Golden Claws shows Thompson and Thomson tricked into passing off the very counterfeit coins they’ve been charged with tracking down: a doubling of illegitimate faces and false “metal”); in the film it literally pours down, in one scene, from the skies, Haddock’s reward for being “true to himself”. Thus Hollywood’s idiotic “message” is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction. It’s like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian, or of Gandhi as a trigger-happy Rambo blasting his way through the Raj.

Tom McCarthy demolishes Steven Spielberg’s Tintin.

Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works

Tom McCarthy at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Echo Chambers

Rejecting the widely held position that writing is an act of self-expression, a way of sharing what’s in our souls, (”sentimental humanism” he’s labelled this, in the past), McCarthy instead put forward the view that language speaks all of us, all the time. Books aren’t, he claimed, objects of individual creation, but “echo chambers”; the best of them “tune” the endless repetitions of language and thought that are zipping back and forth around us.

Sarah Crown in The Guardian on Tom’s Edinburgh Festival talk.