 Failed transcendence forms a central tenet of 'The New York Declaration on Inauthenticity', an INS talk delivered in the style of a propaganda statement by McCarthy and the philosopher Simon Critchley in 2007 in the Drawing Center, New York.In a discussion with the artist Margarita Gluzberg, held in 2001 in London's Austrian Cultural Forum, McCarthy cites Georges Bataille's description of matter as "that non-logical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law".In a lecture delivered to the International James Joyce Symposium in 2004 in Dublin, McCarthy again cites Bataille, drawing on his notion of "base materialism" to throw light on the scatological sensibility displayed in Joyce's novels.