It is here argued that Tom McCarthy’s Remainder may be read through Eric Gans’s anthropological hypothesis of the originary scene. The re-enactments the protagonist performs are seen as rituals, which posit the sacred as present in its absence. In that way Remainder investigates the limits of representation. The protagonist in the novel aims at making the ritual “real”, which leads to a collapse of representation and a reification of the sacred. Thereby the reader experiences a symbolic breakdown of human culture as we conceive it. However, the sacred re-introduces itself as an indestructible factor towards the end of the narrative.