Tom McCarthy, excerpted earlier on the subject of giving, has his book Remainder reviewed in the New York Times on its American release. Here's an earlier Bookforum review.

A couple years ago we linked to his Simon Critchley interview for the Necronautical Society.

Here's a bit more from his Tintin book on the nothing that is Tintin.

Everybody wants to be Tintin: generation after generation. In a world of Rastapopouloses, Tricklers and Carreidases -- or, more prosaically, Jolyon Waggs and Bolt-the-builders -- Tintin represents an unattainable ideal of goodness, cleanness, authenticity. Apostolidès, pondering The Broken Ear, claims that Tintin is like the fetish as, despite being surrounded by corruption, he has a pure soul. Apostolidès is so close and yet so wrong: Tintin is like the fetish alright -- but this is because like Conrad's Kurtz, he is 'hollow at the core'. 'An empty hero', Tisseron calls him, 'void of all idenitity', a blank domino', writes Serres, 'the empty and transparent circle'. The 'degree zero of typeage', he is also the degree zero of character, of history, of life itself. Beautiful, seductive, he is, like Bazac's castrato, the vanishing point of all desire. The black dots of his eyes are the opposite of every sun, his skin the antitype of any color. Tintin is pure negative, the whiteness of the whale, the sexlessness of the unconsummated marriage, the radical erasure of the Khamsin. In The Blue Lotus Dawson complains that he and his network of accomplices are toujours tenus en échec par ce gamin! -- 'always frustrated by this kid!'. Linguistically as well as psychologically, his complaint is bang on the money: the expression faire tintin means, as the dictionary of French slang points out, 'to be deprived of a satisfaction expected or due to one, to be frustrated in something'. Tintin is what happens to Sir Francis, and Tintin is the trauma of that event replaying for the Captain. Even his name contains a deadly repetition: Tin-tin -- like the cars, the cows, the knights: Tintin, nothing, generalised collapse of all economies.

P. 160-161

Cars, cows, knights: all simulacra of the ideals; ob. cit. Plato's Sophist.

  ¶ 8:52 PM