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

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.