Returns (on Bachmann): A Performance-Lecture by Tom McCarthy

April 21, 2026 | 6:30 PM

TICKETS AVAILABLE IN DUE COURSE

Join us for Returns, a performance-lecture by novelist Tom McCarthy, presented as part of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York’s series “‘Today’ is an Impossible Word for Me: Bachmann at 100.”

Held in the theater of the Austrian Cultural Forum during the centennial year of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973), the performance explores the recurring structures, cycles, and conceptual returns within Bachmann’s work. Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic notions of return: From Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence to Freud’s return of the repressed. McCarthy traces how Bachmann’s writing intertwines thinking, trauma, and literary form. Moving across disciplines and references, the lecture situates Bachmann’s oeuvre in dialogue with filmmakers such as Lynch and Kubrick and writers including Joyce and Mallarmé, opening a broader reflection on repetition, memory, and cultural production.

About the Author

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theater, and radio. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third novel, C, was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, and Satin Island was shortlisted again in 2015. He is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. McCarthy has held visiting professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York, and Städelschule Frankfurt. Since 2022 he has served as Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Born in Scotland, he now holds Swedish-British citizenship and lives in Berlin. Image: Johannes Schriek