Monday, April 15, 2013

(Note: I am writing this post on Monday afternoon and scheduling it to go up later this evening – I am not blogging from the Granta party!)

I'm very pleased to announce that I've been named one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists.

If you're in the UK, my second novel The Teleportation Accident, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, was published in paperback last week by Sceptre.

If you're in the US, the book was recently published in hardback by Bloomsbury.

Here is a full list of my appearances over the next few weeks, many of them related to the Granta list. Click to see the whole poster.

Thursday, April 04, 2013

'Freud liked to associate the system-building of paranoia with philosophy: "a paranoiac delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system," he writes in Totem and Taboo (1913). Did he sense that the analogy might run the other way too? Might the systematizing of madness in psychoanalysis be a defense against madness? There is a paranoid dimension in much postwar French philosophy as well – the alienation of the gaze in Sartre and Lacan, the power of surveillance in Foucault, and so on but – but the stake is different. As suggested above, perhaps the very critique of the subject in such philosophy is also a secret mission to rescue it. As Leo Bersani comments: "In paranoia, the primary function of the enemy is to provide a definition of the real that make paranoia necessary. We must therefore begin to suspect the paranoid structure itself as a device by which consciousness maintains the polarity of self and non self, thus preserving the concept of identity."'

from 'Blinded Insights: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of the Mentally Ill' by Hal Foster