Surplus Matter

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.

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.

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.”

Literature, in short, is not made up of ‘characters’: it understands that existence, whether individual or collective, is formed and unformed within networks of language and ceremony, spread across topographies whose axes, or gravitational force-fields, are law, pleasure and mortality, subject to the exigencies of topography itself. As such, it offers, at its deepest, neither commentary nor entertainment; rather, it is the very source-code of our being, index of its contingencies.

In this powerful new essay, Tom McCarthy comes to bury psychology and praise Freud.

Tom McCarthy at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

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.

We want to go to the heavens as heroes, but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves.

Tom McCarthy in Simon Critchley’s Impossible Objects.

Tom McCarthy writes about Jaws in the Summer 2011 issue of Bookmunch.

If, as a young aspirant writer in the early-to-mid 1990s, you raised your head and took a look around the British literary landscape, one figure stood out from all the others: Deborah Levy. Read two pages of her work, and it was instantly apparent that she was a writer as much at home within the fields of visual and conceptual art, philosophy and performance as within that of the printed word. She’d read her Lacan and Deleuze, her Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Gertrude Stein, and Ballard, not to mention Kafka and Robbe-Grillet — and was putting all these characters to work in new, exhilarating ways.

An extract from Tom McCarthy’s introduction to Deborah Levy’s forthcoming Swimming Home.

But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying — or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing.

Extracts from Tom McCarthy’s brilliant review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King in the New York Times.