Returns (on Bachmann): A Performance-Lecture by Tom McCarthy
April 21, 2026 | 6:30 PM
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Join us for “Returns”, a performance-lecture by novelist Tom McCarthy, as part of the series “Today” is an Impossible Word for Me: Bachmann at 100” marking the centennial of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973).
About the Event
Drawing on philosophical, historical, and psychoanalytic conceptions of return, McCarthy examines the recurring patterns that shape Bachmann’s literary project. Setting this in dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, he explores how repetition, memory, and trauma operate within her work — unfolding it in turn across a broader cultural landscape, where its scenes mix with those of filmmakers such as David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, of writers from James Joyce to Stéphane Mallarmé. In Bachmann’s distinctive vision, thinking is inseparable from trauma, and writing becomes this event-field’s Schuldbuch or ledger. With Returns, McCarthy shows that Bachmann should be seen not only as a giant of postwar European literature, but also as a model for all artistic and social practise in which memory, recurrence and the persistence of unresolved histories are at play.
“Returns” follows the release of Tom McCarthy’s book-length study of Ingeborg Bachmann, The Threshold and the Ledger, published by Notting Hill Editions and distributed by New York Review of Books in the US.
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 Booker Prize in 2010, and his fourth, Satin Island, was again shortlisted in 2015. In 2013 he received the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. McCarthy is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His forthcoming novel, The Rhyl Poster, will be published in October 2026. He has held visiting professorships at Royal College of Art, Columbia University, and Städelschule, and since 2022 has served as Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Originally from London, he now holds Swedish-British citizenship and lives in Berlin Image: Johannes Schriek