Culture Now: Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy

CHANGE TO PUBLISHED PROGRAMME: Due to unforeseen circumstances, we regret that Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy are unable to join us for Culture Now

We are pleased however to confirm that Ivan Ward, Deputy Director and Head of Learning at the Freud Museum will be in conversation with Gregor Muir, ICA Executive Director. The talk will include discussion around previous artists' engagement with the Freud Museum, from Sarah Lucas's The Pleasure Principle to Ellen Gallagher's Ichthyosaurus, and the Louise Bourgeois exhibition, The Return of the Repressed.

Join Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy for a lunchtime talk around the issues raised by Critchley's new book The Faith of the Faithless (Verso, 2012). Topics will include the relation between politics, religion and violence, and the possibility of a supreme fiction in relation to art, literature and philosophy.

Critchley and McCarthy have collaborated closely for the past ten years in connection with their semi-fictitious organization, the International Necronautical Society (INS), and have written together on Joyce, Shakespeare, and inauthenticity. A volume of their INS texts has just appeared in German with Diaphanes and is forthcoming in English from Sternberg Press.

Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder won the 2007 Believer Book Award and is currently being adapted for cinema by Film4. His novel C was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Outside of his role in the INS, he has also made artworks including multimedia and interactive installations, and collaborated with Johan Grimonprez on the award-winning film Double Take. He has recently taught and lectured at the London Consortium and Columbia University, among others. He lives in London and New York.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. In additon to The Faith of the Faithless, he is author of many books including Very Little...Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007) and Impossible Objects (2011). He runs a philosophy column for The New York Times, called The Stone, where he is a frequent contributor.