Surplus Matter

Tom McCarthy mentioned by David Shields in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This, perhaps, approaches what we’re trying to feel our way toward: the breach, the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned, the departure from the script. To put it in fashionable Badiouan, the Event. The INS believes in the Event—in the power of the event, and that of art, to carry that event within itself: bring it to pass, or hold it in abeyance, as potentiality. And, paradoxically, the best way that art can do this is by allowing itself to be distracted, gazing in the rear view mirror.

The INS in The Believer.

Details of the INS Shanghai Declaration on Inauthenticity.

Details of the Hearing on the Activities of the International Necronautical Society
with Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley organised in NYC by Triple Canopy on 15 September.

An evening of discussions and interrogations organised by the International Necronautical Society on 29 July 2010 at the Barbican in London:

Tom McCarthy will be joined by award-winning novelist Chloe Aridjis and scholar Richard Martin as they interrogate acclaimed writer and psychoanalyst Darian Leader and leading architect Patrick Lynch. The proceedings will be monitored by INS Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach and INS Environmental Engineer Laura Hopkins.

1. to reinstate Matt Parker to the post of INS Experimental Volunteer. Expelled in the 2003 Purges for the crime of ‘not being dead’, he replied, with impeccable integrity, by contracting cancer. Learning that he wouldn’t be cured, he demanded restitution to his post, then died. The Executive Council has approved this request, cum laude. Every angel is terrifying. Welcome back.

The INS’s General Meeting marking its 10th anniversary.

The International Necronautical Society will hold a general meeting in London on Monday 14 December to mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of the INS’s founding manifesto.

Tom McCarthy interviewed about the International Necronautical Society in French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

“Trying to beat death isn’t interesting — any dumb Christian thinks that’s possible.” Tom McCarthy, General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), firmly believes in the virtues of demanding the impossible: “What was interesting was launching an absurd, metaphor-laden conceit and using it as a tool and structure to make meaning happen.” The absurd conceit in question — “death is a type of space which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” — was contained in the organisation’s founding manifesto drafted ten years ago. The sheer barminess of such a mission statement placed it squarely “in the zone of silence and impossibility from which,” according to the INS, “all good art stems”.

Andrew Gallix on the International Necronautical Society in the summer 2009 issue of Flux Magazine.

We begin by congratulating the Obama Administration on commissioning this report from the INS. Turning to an organization whose thinking is steeped in literature, philosophy, and the arts in the hope of acquiring insight into the economic recession and suggestions as to how this hardship might be overcome may to some smack of desperation. Yet the INS commends the administration’s decision to do so as both courageous and enlightened. In (implicitly) acknowledging the critical role played by art in creating (and subverting) value, President Obama has, symbolically at least, righted the wrong done to the poet Seanchan in W. B. Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold.

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy’s “Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics” from the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.