Artists Space

Ecstatic Temporality, or, The Time of Justice
a conversation with Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy

Tuesday, October 6
7pm
Free, no RSVP required

Please join us for a conversation celebrating the publication of new books by Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy.

Flyer featuring two black-and-white portraits of male figures, positioned above two images of book covers. The book cover on the left features a small image of a man writing at a desk, with text above that reads "Simon Critchley / Heidegger Thinking / Being and Time Explained" and text below reads "Edited by Ben Olson." The book cover on the right features a full page image of the yellow interior of a building with glass windows and text that reads "Tom McCarthy / The Rhyl Poster." Additional black text on a white background gives the event details and time.
[Flyer featuring two black-and-white portraits of male figures, positioned above two images of book covers. The book cover on the left features a small image of a man writing at a desk, with text above that reads "Simon Critchley / Heidegger Thinking / Being and Time Explained" and text below reads "Edited by Ben Olson." The book cover on the right features a full page image of the yellow interior of a building with glass windows and text that reads "Tom McCarthy / The Rhyl Poster." Additional black text on a white background gives the event details and time.]

This Fall, Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy are both publishing, with NYRB, new books whose contents, while conceived quite separately, implicitly continue the dialogue these two have been having with each other for almost three decades. One (Critchley’s Heidegger Thinking) an intensely close reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time, the other (McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster) a hallucinatory novel about a drug-addicted legal theorist, both turn around the relation between reality and perception, geometry and violence, language and truth, being and death. In their first public event together in eleven years, alternating between discussion of and readings from the two works, they will unpick the faultlines of these relations, in dialogue with each other and the audience.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His previous novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.

Simon Critchley has written more than twenty books, including studies of Greek tragedy, David Bowie, football, suicide, Shakespeare, how philosophers die, and a novella. HIs previous book, Mysticism, was published by New York Review Books in 2024. He is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Director of the Onassis Foundation.

Artists Space Venue is generously supported by Stephen Cheng, Allan Schwartzman, and David Zwirner.