“Everything Must Leave Some Kind of Mark”: An Agambenian Reading of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

Year 2025, Volume: 35 Issue: 1, 109 - 125, 19.06.2025

Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2024-1485015

Abstract

The concept of “remnant” or “remainder” holds a special place in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. Across his discussions of language/law, bios/zoe, and potentiality/ impotentiality, Agamben dismantles binary oppositions through the concept of ‘remainder,’ focusing on the zone of indistinction that exceeds division and dialectical thinking. The concept of remainder, which functions as a key in the thought of Agamben, is also the title of Tom McCarthy’s debut novel Remainder (2005). The novel unfolds the story of an unnamed thirty-year-old man whose life takes a dramatic turn after an accident involving “something falling from the sky.” Following his emergence from a coma, he finds himself in a threshold where he is a remnant of his former identity. For months, he endeavours to recover both his memory and motor control with the expectation that he will eventually return to a semblance of normalcy. But contrary to expectations, he develops a fixation on recreating, re-enacting, and simulating specific scenes and situations that linger in his memory as disjointed images. From Agamben’s standpoint, he might be approached as the ‘remainder’ of the human/inhuman binary, akin to a ‘remnant’ during the time of the end, a parody of the sovereign who suspends law to create his state of exception, or a ‘kink’ in the smoothly operating system of simulations. This paper offers a reading of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder from Giorgio Agamben’s perspective and provides an analysis of its eccentric character’s relationship with time, space, and reality by delving into the threshold he occupies.

Keywords

Remainder , kairotic time , homo sacer , Tom McCarthy , Giorgio Agamben

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