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 [REF].
McCarthy created an art project around Cocteau's Orphée, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2004, which consisted of forty assistants cutting up text, projecting it onto the walls and then re-assembling it into cryptic messages which were transmitted around London and the world by radio and internet.