Artificial Intensities: The Question of Reality and Immersion in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the methods through which reality may be attained in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Through a post-structuralist, chiefly Deleuzian lens, I argue that Remainder presents the reader with a return to the postmodern conception of the ‘real’, while also affirming the necessity, both subjective and objective, of moving beyond it. Such a stance is, I argue, only apparently paradoxical, absurd. In Remainder, this article proposes, reality is achieved through artificiality, and not around it, by accelerating a process of performative immersion which facilitates what Deleuze and Guattari consider to be a fundamental property of artificiality: its tendency to self-destruct.