Surplus Matter

“We had decided that I should arrive by sea. Amsterdam has always been a port, so entering it this way had a certain logic, given my brief. It was anything but practical, though.”

Short fiction by Tom McCarthy.

“He leans against a lamppost. Beneath the silk top hat his face is angular; a goatee drops from the chin and then curls upwards, tapering to a fine point at the end. Cabs are standing in a row along the facing curb, cabmen reading papers, horses snorting. Behind them at the entrance to a park old men are talking on a bench. Around the corner comes a group of schoolgirls carrying croquet hoops and mallets. The girls wear sky-blue sailor shirts: the Legion of Honour uniform. Their voices drop to whispers as they pass him.”

Nine sketches by Tom McCarthy

“Some months ago, it was suggested by the Corporation of London that the best way of dealing with the pigeons fouling the high-rise on the twelfth floor of which the International Necronautical Society has its HQ was to drape netting over the whole building, cap-a-pied. Having spent a year researching the history of cartography with a view to mapping death - researching this history in all its details, from the variations between Mercator, Petersen and Polar Gnomonic map projections to the question of graticule to instances of blank and one-to-one scale maps (Lewis Carrol’s oeuvre is awash with these) - INS staff were intrigued by the prospect of having a grid square superimposed over their splendid view of the world’s greatest city. They were, however, even more appalled by the thought of working in what would effectively become a cage, and lobbied the Corporation to opt for an alternative method of pigeon control.”

by Tom McCarthy
At the Still Point… orig pub in Contemporary Magazine, London, 2004
In When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s magnificent 1996 documentary about the great Ali-Foreman boxing match of 1974, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, Mohammed Ali at one point tackles the question of the speed at which he operates. ‘They have cameras,’ he tells […]

by Tom McCarthy
In Search of Terror’s… orig pub in Strange Attractor Issue 1, London 2004
‘A screaming comes across the sky.’ So begins Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s vast 1973 novel about the V2 Rocket Bomb. Hurtling down on London in the final months of World War Two, the V2 brought with it a terror deeper and […]

By Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy
Universal Shylockery, orig pub Shakespeare Quarterly, 2004
What if Nietzsche were a Jew, and a mean-minded Venetian Jew at that? We’d like to begin with the thought-experiment of imagining The Merchant of Venice as a genealogy of morality and imagining Shylock as Nietzsche. What is The Merchant of Venice about? What […]

by Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy
Of Chrematology orig delivered at International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, 2002 and pub Hypermedia Joyce Studies Volume 4, 2003
[1]Finnegans Wake is awash with money. There are English pounds, ‘shelenks [2] and pence, American bison nickels, French louis, Russian kopecks, German grosch and ‘dogmarks’ [3]. ‘Woodpiles of haypennies’ [4], the […]

by Tom McCarthy
Letting Rip, orig delivered at International James Joyce Symposium, Dublin, 2004 and pub Hypermedia Joyce Studies Volume 5, 2005
Sergei Pankajev, the young Russian known to Freud as the Wolf Man, to his own dreaming mind as ‘Espe’ or SP, and to Derrida, via a dirty picture of a sodomitic Plato and Socrates, as […]

by Tom McCarthy 
Shipping the Disaster Home orig pub Raid Projects, Los Angeles, 2003
‘Matter,’ writes Georges Bataille in La Dépense, is ‘the nonlogical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law.’ What better corroborator could Bataille’s claim have than Roman Vasseur’s common […]

by Tom McCarthy
Between Pain and Nothing orig delivered South London Gallery, 2003 and pub in ‘The Milgram Re-enactment: Rod Dickinson’s Re-enactment of Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ Experiment’, Jan van Eyck Press, Holland, 2004
Interviewing the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas for a 1982 Radio France-Culture series, transcripts of which would later be published under the title Ethics […]