Simon Critchley - Quotes

So, I am a b*stard, and the English are b*stards. But the really bad news is that you are too. My vision of Europe would be Europe of b*stards for whom the question of legitimacy was a site of endless struggle and contestation...
Critchley, Simon.

I have argued that philosophy doesn't begin in wonder or in the fact that things are, it begins in a realization that things are not what they might be. It begins with a sense of a lack, of something missing, and that provokes a series of questions.
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

The other side of my work is political disappointment - the realization that we are living in an unjust world. "Blood is being spilled in the merriest way, as if it was champagne," Dostoevsky says. That raises the problem of justice, what it might mean in an unjust world and whether there can be an ethics and a political practice that would be able to face and face down the injustice of the present. How might we begin to think about that?
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program.
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program.
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case.
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

The second claim is more normative. I propose a certain picture of the ethical subject, based on an infinite ethical demand. It is that which makes me the ethical subject that I am, but not in a way that is reducible to autonomy. It is something which continually exceeds my capacity to approve of it. So I've got this basic idea, which comes from Levinas initially, that morality has to be referred back to an idea of an ethical relation, a relationship between myself and another, a relationship of asymmetry, of inequality. It is that basic situation that I want to put at the core of this neo-anarchism.
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

So yes, I'm trying to think about the connections between politics and poetry. There's an awful lot you could say here.Poetics is a form of poesis, a form of production-construction, but there might be ways of conceiving of that in a much more interesting manner. That's what I'm thinking about at the moment.
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

Also, rights are not things that are given in the heavens. Rather, they are levers for political articulations, which enables what was previously invisible to become visible.
Critchley, Simon and Anders Gullestad (Interviewer). "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley." in: truthout. May 15, 2010. (English).

Just to say “Well, God is dead” in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.
Critchley, Simon and Steve Fowler (Interviewer). "A Living Breathing Philosopher: Vice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered Species." in: Vice. June 2009. (English).

It’s complicated. On the one hand we’re killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing.
Critchley, Simon and Steve Fowler (Interviewer). "A Living Breathing Philosopher: Vice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered Species." in: Vice. June 2009. (English).

The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic.
Critchley, Simon and Steve Fowler (Interviewer). "A Living Breathing Philosopher: Vice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered Species." in: Vice. June 2009. (English).

There’s a floating distraction in the contemporary world, life at a distance enabled by technology. I want people to commit at the level of their subjectivity. The idea of subjective commitment is at the core of ethics, something that divides the self from itself. I become an ethical self. I cannot meet that ideal, I cannot fulfill it, it divides me from myself and it makes me strive harder. This ideal subjective ethical drive is at the heart of an absolutely earnest, radical politics that insists that people will be able to engage with each other, and they’re lifted from irony at that point.
Critchley, Simon and Steve Fowler (Interviewer). "A Living Breathing Philosopher: Vice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered Species." in: Vice. June 2009. (English).

I think governments are quietly terrified. There’s massive unemployment, a recession they don’t know how to deal with, and the measures they’ve taken are not working yet, and maybe they’re not going to work. There’s a prospect of significant social disorder.
Critchley, Simon and Steve Fowler (Interviewer). "A Living Breathing Philosopher: Vice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered Species." in: Vice. June 2009. (English).

Philosophy is the art of dying.Philosophy is an activity that has always been concerned with how one seizes hold of one’s mortality, and I see myself continuing a very ancient tradition that goes back to Socrates and Epicurus, which is that to be a philosopher is to try and learn how to die. In learning how to die, one learns how to live.
Critchley, Simon and Steve Fowler (Interviewer). "A Living Breathing Philosopher: Vice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered Species." in: Vice. June 2009. (English).

There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good". This is hardly news.
Critchley, Simon. "Barack Obama and the American Void." in: Open Democracy. January 24, 2009.

Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.
Critchley, Simon. "Barack Obama and the American Void." in: Open Democracy. January 24, 2009.

The yearning for the common good comes from the refusal to accept that perhaps Americans have very little in common apart from the elements of a sometimes successful civil religion based around a sentimental, indeed sometimes teary-eyed, attachment to the constitution and a belief in the quasi-divine wisdom of the founding fathers.
Critchley, Simon. "Barack Obama and the American Void." in: Open Democracy. January 24, 2009.

Being anthropologically respectful of all faiths means being committed to none, and being left to drift without an anchor for one's most deeply held beliefs. To have such an anchor means being committed to a specific community. The only way Obama can overcome his sense of detachment and resolve his mother's dilemma is through a commitment to Christianity.
Critchley, Simon. "Barack Obama and the American Void." in: Open Democracy. January 24, 2009.

We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realisation that nothing will change.
Critchley, Simon. "Barack Obama and the American Void." in: Open Democracy. January 24, 2009.

For authoritarians such as Lenin and Žižek, the dichotomy in politics is state power or no power, but I refuse to concede that these are the only options. Genuine politics is about the movement between these poles, and it takes place through the creation of what I call “interstitial distance” within the state.
Critchley, Simon. "Resistance is Utile." in: Harpers. May 2008. (English).

Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek’s position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville’s Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man’s hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.
Critchley, Simon. "Resistance is Utile." in: Harpers. May 2008. (English).

Montaigne is really the hero of the book and I love his suspicion of suspicion, his skepticism and the deeply personal quality of his prose, which is never narcissistic. It is ourselves that we find in Montaigne, not him. But I suppose that’s a narcissistic thing to say.
Critchley, Simon and Andrew Gallix (Interviewer). "Dead Philosophers Society: an Interview with Simon Critchley." in: 3: AM Magazine. June 26, 2008.

If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I’d want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to what it means to be human, and a narcissism of self-regard, like Rousseau’s distinction between amour de soi and amour propre, self-love and pride.
Critchley, Simon and Andrew Gallix (Interviewer). "Dead Philosophers Society: an Interview with Simon Critchley." in: 3: AM Magazine. June 26, 2008.

It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.
Critchley, Simon and Andrew Gallix (Interviewer). "Dead Philosophers Society: an Interview with Simon Critchley." in: 3: AM Magazine. June 26, 2008.

It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.
Critchley, Simon and Andrew Gallix (Interviewer). "Dead Philosophers Society: an Interview with Simon Critchley." in: 3: AM Magazine. June 26, 2008.

I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.
Critchley, Simon and Andrew Gallix (Interviewer). "Dead Philosophers Society: an Interview with Simon Critchley." in: 3: AM Magazine. June 26, 2008.

I think for Alain Badiou's work to be understood will require the creation of a new theoretical space or a new intellectual space where all things come together; a very strong and constructive idea of philosophy which is, in a certain way, novel and unlike what one is used to within a certain - let's call it- deconstructive discourse.
Critchley, Simon and Alain Badiou. "Ours is Not a Terrible Situation." in: Philosophy Today. Vol. 51, No. 3, Fall 2007. (English).

The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox.
Critchley, Simon and Alain Badiou. "Ours is Not a Terrible Situation." in: Philosophy Today. Vol. 51, No. 3, Fall 2007. (English).

Let’s begin by asking: what exactly happened in the American Presidential elections last year? Or rather, how did Bush win?
Critchley, Simon. "Crypto-Schmittianism." in: State of Nature 2. Winter 2006. (English).

Indeed, what unites the Bush Administration and Al Qaeda is their obsession with the spectacle, a painful love affair with the image, both the image of empire’s spectacular defeat on that sunny September morning four years ago, and the attempt to respond to that defeat with the image of ‘shock and awe’ in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (I will come back to the theme of awe); both the carefully controlled and choreographed video appearances of Osama bin Laden sitting cross-legged in a cave and speaking softly with an AK 47 propped up behind him, or ‘W’ strutting and smiling in combat fatigues on an aircraft carrier to declare the end of hostilities.
Critchley, Simon. "Crypto-Schmittianism." in: State of Nature 2. Winter 2006. (English).

That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.
Critchley, Simon. "Crypto-Schmittianism." in: State of Nature 2. Winter 2006. (English).

Shore up the mean with reverence and terror. But never banish terror from the gates of the state. The stronger the fear, the stronger the reverence for the just, the stronger your country’s wall and the city’s safety.
Critchley, Simon. "Crypto-Schmittianism." in: State of Nature 2. Winter 2006. (English).

Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.
Critchley, Simon. "Crypto-Schmittianism." in: State of Nature 2. Winter 2006. (English).

In the US, what passes for Christianity – and it is, to say the least, a highly perverse, possessive individualist and capitalist version of what I would see as Christ’s messianic ethical communism, to say the least – is a new civil religion, a civil religion of freedom.
Critchley, Simon. "Crypto-Schmittianism." in: State of Nature 2. Winter 2006. (English).

What led me to that claim was a long love affair with poetry that really intensified once I stopped writing poetry in my mid-20s (I just wasn’t any good and thank God I stopped), combined with my professional deformation as a philosopher.
Critchley, Simon and Mark Thwaite (Interviewer). "Interview with Readybook." in: Ready Steady Book. March 1, 2006. (English).

Poetry is difficult, I mean interesting poetry, not confessional babble or emotive propaganda. Reading a new poet is discovering an entire world, what Stevens called a ‘mundo’ and it takes a lot of time to orientate oneself in such a world. What we have to learn to do then, as teachers and militants of a poetic insurgency, is to encourage people to learn to love the difficulty of poetry. I simply do not understand much of the poetry that I love.
Critchley, Simon and Mark Thwaite (Interviewer). "Interview with Readybook." in: Ready Steady Book. March 1, 2006. (English).

My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can’t breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction.
Critchley, Simon and Mark Thwaite (Interviewer). "Interview with Readybook." in: Ready Steady Book. March 1, 2006. (English).

Thanks for your questions and forgive my answers.
Critchley, Simon and Mark Thwaite (Interviewer). "Interview with Readybook." in: Ready Steady Book. March 1, 2006. (English).

Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.
Critchley, Simon. "Satura Resartus: Living in the Woods with Bears." in: Law and Literature. Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn 2005, p. 433-441. (English).

Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human being who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious.
Critchley, Simon. "Satura Resartus: Living in the Woods with Bears." in: Law and Literature. Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn 2005, p. 433-441. (English).

Any philosophical and theoretical assurance that laughter is unique to the human being becomes somewhat unsure when one turns to the anthropological literature.
Critchley, Simon. "Satura Resartus: Living in the Woods with Bears." in: Law and Literature. Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn 2005, p. 433-441. (English).

We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.
Critchley, Simon. "Satura Resartus: Living in the Woods with Bears." in: Law and Literature. Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn 2005, p. 433-441. (English).

When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh outloud, "Okay come clean now. This isn't really about hunting, is it?" But when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting, and if we laugh at all, then it is what Beckett calls the "mirthless laugh", which laughs at that which is unhappy.
Critchley, Simon. "Satura Resartus: Living in the Woods with Bears." in: Law and Literature. Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn 2005, p. 433-441. (English).

I’ve always been very keen on Pascal, and what I’m most keen on in Pascal is his emphasis upon human wretchedness. He has a phrase which goes something like ‘Anxiety, boredom and inconstancy, that is the human condition’ and I’ve always been very partial to that.
Critchley, Simon and Shirley Dent (Interviewer). "Interview: Simon Critchley." in Culture Wars. December 1, 2002.

Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or what he later calls the super-ego. And that can be lacerated - if you think of the anorexic who sees themselves from the perspective of the image they have, of the image they have of themselves in the mirror which is false - that would be the super-ego. Super-ego is what generates depression and it is what has to be dealt with in psychoanalysis.
Critchley, Simon and Shirley Dent (Interviewer). "Interview: Simon Critchley." in Culture Wars. December 1, 2002.

The thing about humour is that the super-ego is also at play, so what interested me, particularly in the last chapter which is key to the book -and no one seems to have picked this up in writings on Freud - is that, in the later Freud, the essence of humour is the ability to look at myself and find myself ridiculous. That makes me laugh.
Critchley, Simon and Shirley Dent (Interviewer). "Interview: Simon Critchley." in Culture Wars. December 1, 2002.

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that’s an anxious atheism. It’s an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.
Critchley, Simon and Shirley Dent (Interviewer). "Interview: Simon Critchley." in Culture Wars. December 1, 2002.

Christianity in the West, opens up a perspective of depth into what it means to be a self. And that depth of the self is something that is experienced in the sight of God. So that the great thinkers of self and subjectivity are Paul and Augustine. They look at the self from the perspective of God and they find themselves wretched and interesting. Constituted by conflictual desires.
Critchley, Simon and Shirley Dent (Interviewer). "Interview: Simon Critchley." in Culture Wars. December 1, 2002.

Genuinely great humour recognises the world it’s describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That’s what great art should do. That’s what great philosophy should do. The one thing about humour is that this is an everyday practice that does this.
Critchley, Simon and Shirley Dent (Interviewer). "Interview: Simon Critchley." in Culture Wars. December 1, 2002.