Surplus Matter

Lithe Young Things

I would suggest that the most noble and heroic thing to be in this life, or perhaps in any other, is the dodgem jockey. You know what I mean: those guys who work the bumper cars in fairgrounds. Not the fat, older one who sits in the control booth — Perec’s fantasy — but the lithe young things who cling to the backs of moving cars, hopping from one to the next.

Tom’s excellent “Dodgem Jockeys” essay features in the May issue of The Believer.

The Crackle of Information

Tom McCarthy’s Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works is published as a Vintage Books eBook Original on 22 May.

Letting Speak

The best definition of writing I could give would be “letting speak” — if that word “let” is understood in all its double and triple senses: to allow (something or someone else) to speak; to interrupt (hinder) the flow of speech, break language up, allowing for what’s unspoken to infiltrate its frequency; to underwrite or lease out speech. The one thing writing’s not is straight-up speaking.

Tom McCarthy telles the Guardian what’s on his desktop.

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.

The Fallenness of Things

We’ve both raved in the past about Bataille’s notion of l’informe: matter which won’t be placed within some taxonomic system or Aufgehobt—lifted up, sublimated into refined concepts or objects of representation—but instead just gets itself squashed and messed everywhere.

Tom McCarthy and Margarita Gluzberg in conversation in BOMBlog.

K Shortlisted for Prize

Tom McCarthy’s K (C) has been shortlisted for the German foreign fiction prize.

Trauma und Technik Tonight

A Michael Hillebrecht documentary devoted to Tom McCarthy, entitled Die Module spielen verrückt - Trauma und Technik bei Tom McCarthy, will be broadcast on German radio tonight. You can listen to a live stream.

Supreme Fiction

Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley are giving a lunchtime talk at London’s ICA on 30 March. They will be discussing Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless, “the relation between politics, religion and violence, and the possibility of a supreme fiction in relation to art, literature and philosophy”.

German Dates

Details of Tom McCarthy’s German tour, March 2012.