Simon Critchley's first book, The Ethics of Deconstruction, was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. This edition contains three new appendices and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of The Ethics of Deconstruction.

The return to religion has perhaps become the dominant cliche of contemporary theory, which rarely offers anything more than an exaggerated echo of a political reality dominated by religious war. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era, where political action flows directly from metaphysical conflict. The Faith of the Faithless asks how we might respond. Following Critchley's Infinitely Demanding, this new book builds on its philosophical and political framework, also venturing into the questions of (...) faith, love, religion and violence. Should we defend a version of secularism and quietly accept the slide into a form of theism--or is there another way? From Rousseau's politics and religion to the return to St. Paul in Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Zizek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence, and the limits of non-violence. (shrink)

In Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? Through spirited confrontations with major thinkers, such as Lacan, Nancy, Rorty, and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida, Critchley finds answers in a nuanced “ethics of finitude” and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. Democracy, economics, friendship, and technology are all (...) considered anew in Critchley’s bold excursions on the meaning and value of recent French philosophy. (shrink)

The context in which the British Medical Association first considered publishing specific guidelines on decisions about attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation , in the early 1990s, needs to be remembered. At that time the subject was often seen as far too sensitive to be mentioned to patients. Many hospitals had no formal policy about how CPR decisions should be made, apart from an expectation that these were purely medical matters. Advance decision making about CPR, where it existed, appears to have been generally (...) on an ad hoc basis by doctors. Patients, their relatives and the rest of the health care team were often unaware of it. After several cases in which nurses had been disciplined–unfairly in the eyes of some–for complying with their patients' known wishes about non-resuscitation in cases where no advance medical decision had been recorded, there was a demand for guidance.The BMA was approached by nurses' representatives with a view to publishing some very basic advice. This advice, issued in 1993 jointly with the Royal College of Nursing, and in association with the Resuscitation Council, was under 1000 words. Whether this brevity reflects difficulties in achieving consensus or lower expectations about what was required is a matter for speculation. Throughout the 1990s the guidance was distributed widely and used as a basis for many hospitals' local policies. Recently, however, the demands on the BMA and other professional bodies for ethical advice have changed and grown. Discussion of sensitive decisions about potentially life-prolonging interventions is now …. (shrink)

Does humour make us human, or do the cats and dogs laugh along with us? On Humour is a fascinating, beautifully written and funny book on what humour can tell us about being human. Simon Critchley skilfully probes some of the most perennial but least understood aspects of humour, such as our tendency to laugh at animals and our bodies, why we mock death with comedy and why we think it's funny when people act like machines. He also looks at (...) the darker side of humour, as rife in sexism and racism and argues that it is important for reminding us of people we would rather not be. (shrink)

This paper attempts to provide an account of what is philosophically distinctive about what has come to be known as 'Continental philosophy'. In the early parts of the paper I give a historical and cultural analysis of the emergence of Continental philosophy and consider objections to the latter and some stereotypical representations of the analytic-Continental divide. In the philosophically more substantial part of the paper, I seek to redraw the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy by focusing on a number (...) of themes: (i) the centrality of tradition and history for Continental philosophy and the way this affects philosophical practices of argumentation and interpretation, (ii) the way in which the concept of Continental philosophy emerges out of the German idealist reception of the Kantian critique of metaphysics and the significant way this is continued in Nietzsche with his concept of nihilism, (iii) the centrality of the concepts of critique, emancipation and praxis for the Continental tradition, (iv) the importance of the theme of crisis that runs through the Continental tradition, (v) an explanation and justification of the pervasive anti-scientism of the Continental tradition. I conclude by explaining and criticizing the professionalization of philosophy that has produced the analytic-Continental divide, insofar as this divide disguises a deeper possible debate about the identity of philosophy itself outside of its professional confines. (shrink)

Simon Critchley discusses his views on education and philosophy, reflecting on his experiences as a student from childhood to the present, his anxieties about teaching, and what philosophical writing he wants from his students. By discussing his relationships with influential teachers in his life, Dr. Critchley explores the problem of teachers as masters; the need to develop philosophy’s approach to tradition while engaging problems posed to it by work on race and gender; his experience conducting online, public philosophy through The (...) Stone; and the politics of student and adjunct labor in higher education. (shrink)

On Heidegger's Being and Time is an outstanding exploration of Heidegger's most important work by two major philosophers. Simon Critchley argues that we must see Being and Time as a radicalization of Husserl's phenomenology, particularly his theories of intentionality, categorial intuition, and the phenomenological concept of the a priori. This leads to a reappraisal and defense of Heidegger's conception of phenomenology. In contrast, Reiner Schürmann urges us to read Heidegger 'backward', arguing that his later work is the key to unravelling (...) Being and Time . Through a close reading of Being and Time Schürmann demonstrates that this work is ultimately aporetic because the notion of Being elaborated in his later work is already at play within it. This is the first time that Schürmann's renowned lectures on Heidegger have been published. The book concludes with Critchley's reinterpretation of the importance of authenticity in Being and Time . Arguing for what he calls an 'originary inauthenticity', Critchley proposes a relational understanding of the key concepts of the second part of Being and Time : death, conscience and temporality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 34.1 (2004) 3-17 [Access article in PDF] Universal Shylockery Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice Simon Critchley Tom McCarthy What if Nietzsche were a Jew, and a mean-minded Venetian Jew at that? We'd like to begin with the thought experiment of imagining The Merchant of Venice as a genealogy of morality and imagining Shylock as Nietzsche. What is The Merchant of Venice about? What is at (...) stake in this oddly inside-out drama, where a piece of good old Elizabethan comic Jew-baiting rotates 180 degrees into a devastating study of Christian anti-Semitism only to flip back into what it seemed to deny? Our initial hypothesis is that it is nothing less than an inquiry into the origin of our moral concepts of justice, good and bad, and more particularly guilt, law, mercy, and love. It is here that a link with Nietzsche suggests itself, particularly with the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals.* * *How do we breed an animal with the right to make promises? For Nietzsche, the human being is an originally forgetful creature, like a young child. To make this originally forgetful creature remember requires physical discipline; it behooves punishment. The teaching of morality is never gentle; it never droppeth from heaven like gentle rain. On the contrary, if something is to be retained in memory, it must be burned in. The origin of memory lies in pain and cruelty: "Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself" [GM 61]. Nietzsche's first, astonishing hypothesis in the Second Essay is that the origin of concepts like responsibility and conscience lies in cruelty—cruelty administered and maintained through a corporal and corporeal regime. Further, as religions are systems of cruelty, all forms of asceticism originate in the same painful place. "Consider the German punishments," Nietzsche proposes—and we all know that there's nothing quite like the German punishments: stoning, breaking on the wheel, piercing with stakes, tearing apart or trampling with horses, boiling in oil, flaying alive, cutting straps from the flesh, smearing the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him to the flies in the blazing sun. As Nietzsche quips, with magnificent understatement, "With the aid of such images and procedures one finally remembers five or six 'I will not's'" [GM 62]. It is on the basis of this burned-in memory of cruelty that good, decent, upright burghers such as ourselves acquired the habit of moral reasoning:Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over affects, the whole sombre thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all "good things." [GM 62] [End Page 3]"Dearly bought": let's hold onto that trope of purchasing. In another extraordinary passage of the Second Essay, Nietzsche explains the origin of thinking itself in terms of economic activity:Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a sense they are thinking [das Denken ist]. [GM 70] In the beginning was trade. Human activity begins with exchange, with the to and fro of buying and selling, which are forms of life older than all other social alliances and organization. It is from here, Nietzsche insists, that human beings arrive at the first moral canon of justice:"Everything has its price; all things can be paid for"—the oldest and most naïve moral canon of justice, the beginning of all "good-naturedness," all "fairness," all "good will," all "objectivity" on earth. [GM 70] Which brings us to the origin of das Bewusstsein der Schuld and schlechte Gewissen, the consciousness of guilt and bad conscience. Nietzsche's hypothesis here, and our theme is beginning to come into focus, is that the origin of guilty conscience lies in the relation between a creditor and debtor, Glaubiger und Schuldner. The spiritual concept of guilt, Schuld, originates in the very material concept of Schulden... (shrink)

There are two phrases in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit that provide a clue to what is going on in that book: Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf and Dasein existiert faktisch . I begin by trying to show how an interpretation of these phrases can help clarify Heidegger's philosophical claim about what it means to be human. I then try and explain why it is that, in a couple of important passages in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger describes thrown projection as an enigma (...) . After considering the meaning and etymology of the word ‘enigma’, I trace its usage in Sein und Zeit, and try and show how and why the relations between Heidegger's central conceptual pairings – state‐of‐mind and understanding , thrownness and projection, facticity and existentiality – are described by Heidegger as enigmatic. My thesis is that at the heart of Sein und Zeit, that is, at the heart of the central claim of the Dasein‐analytic as to the temporal character of thrown‐projective being‐in‐the‐world, there lies an enigmatic apriori. That is to say, there is something resiliently opaque at the basis of the constitution of Dasein's being‐in‐the‐world which both resists phenomenological description and which, I shall claim, is that in virtue of which the phenomenologist describes. In the more critical part of the paper, I try and show precisely how this notion of the enigmatic apriori changes the basic experience of understanding Sein und Zeit. I explore this in relation to three examples from Division II: death, conscience and temporality. I try and read Heidegger's analyses of each of these concepts against the grain in order to bring into view much more resilient notions of facticity and thrownness that place in doubt the move to existentiality, projection and authenticity. The perspective I develop can be described as originary inauthenticity. As should become evident, such an interpretation of Sein und Zeit is not without political consequences. (shrink)

Simon Critchley; XI*—The Philosophical Significance of a Poem (On Wallace Stevens), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pa.

This essay attempts to sharpen significantly the critical debate around Levinas’s work by focussing on the question of politics, which is, it is argued, Levinas’s Achilles’heel. Five problems in Levinas’s treatment of politics are identified and discussed: fraternity, monotheism, and rocentrism, the family, and Israel. It is argued that Levinas’s ethics is terribly compromised by his conception of politics. In order to save Levinasian ethics from this compromise, two possibilities are explored: first, to follow Derrida’s separation of ethical form from (...) political content in his recent reading of Levinas, which allows for a notion of political invention linked to ethical responsibility, and second, to link Levinas’s conception of ethics to what is called in the essay the anarchistic disturbanceof politics. In conclusion, this anarchistic experience of ethics in linked to a quite different understanding of politics as the dissensual space of democracy. (shrink)

Very Little... Almost Nothing puts the question of the meaning of life back at the centre of intellectual debate. Its central concern is how we can find a meaning to human finitude without recourse to anything that transcends that finitude. A profound but secular meditation on the theme of death, Critchley traces the idea of nihilism through Blanchot, Levinas, Jena Romanticism and Cavell, culminating in a reading of Beckett, in many ways the hero of the book. In this second edition, (...) Simon Critchley has added a revealing and extended new preface, and a new chapter on Wallace Stevens which reflects on the idea of poetry as philosophy. (shrink)

An experimental text of para-philosophical fragments working toward a poetic ontology. How does one write an experimental ABC: an impossible theory that would deal with a series of phenomena, concepts, places, sensations, persons, and moods? A para-philosophy? Returning to a once abandoned project of fragmented thoughts where the author's voice moves from the serious, to the pathetic, to the absurd, to the cynical, Simon Critchley's ABC of Impossibility finds new life in the form of this small encyclopedic and aphoristic text (...) where the reader bears witness to the slow emergence of an attempt at a poetic ontology. ABC of Impossibility is a unique undertaking that returns to the poetic site of the fragment as thought. Following a heritage of fragmented, aphoristic thinkers including Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Pessoa, Critchley revitalizes a para-philosophical thinking that can only be uttered by way of another, as he declares in the opening pages, "In writing this, I promise to tell the truth, but not to be myself. (shrink)

_"A genial exercise in public philosophy" (_Kirkus_, starred review) from one of the world's best-known popular philosophers__ "Simon Critchley is an international treasure—that rare and real philosopher who embraces Rousseau’s ‘feeling of existence,’ David Bowie’s vision of love, and Philip K. Dick’s genius with genuine wrestling and a soulful smile!’’—Cornel West, Harvard University_ The moderator of the _New York Times_’ Stone column and the author of numerous books on everything from Greek tragedy to David Bowie, Simon Critchley has been a (...) strong voice in popular philosophy for more than a decade. This volume brings together thirty-five essays, originally published in the _Times,_ on a wide range of topics, from the dimensions of Plato’s academy and the mysteries of Eleusis to Philip K. Dick, Mormonism, money, and the joy and pain of Liverpool Football Club fans. In an engaging and jargon‑free style, Critchley writes with honesty about the state of world as he offers philosophically informed and insightful considerations of happiness, violence, and faith. Stripped of inaccessible academic armatures, these short pieces bring philosophy out of the ivory tower and demonstrate an exciting new way to think in public. (shrink)

In this essay I respond to criticisms of my position on the question of the relation between deconstruction, ethics, and politics levelled at me by Richard Rorty and Ernesto Laclau. With regard to the latter, I argue that there is a normative deficit in Laclau's discourse theory' and with regard to the former, I argue that Rorty's reading of Derrida is at the least questionable and I attempt to criticize Rorty on the issues of the status of metaphysics and politics.

This article attempts to illustrate our confrontation with tragedy in contemporary situation, That is why we are discussing this here in seven issues (Feeding the Ancients with Our Own Blood/ Philosophy’s Tragedy and the Dangerous Perhaps/Knowing and Not Knowing: How Oedipus Brings Down Fate/ Rage, Grief, and War/ Gorgias: Tragedy Is a Deception That Leaves the Deceived Wiser/Than the Nondeceived/Justice as Conflict (for Polytheism)/Tragedy as a Dialectical Mode of Experience). Finally, this article seeks to show that tragedy is a way (...) of experience in our life today. Key words: tragedy, philosophy, Greek. (shrink)

Deconstruction and pragmatism constitute two of the major intellectual influences on the contemporary theoretical scene; influences personified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Both Rortian pragmatism, which draws the consequences of post-war developments in Anglo-American philosophy, and Derridian deconstruction, which extends and troubles the phonomenological and Heideggerian influence on the Continental tradition, have hitherto generally been viewed as mutually exclusive philosophical language games. The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with (...) one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface. (shrink)

Simon Critchley (born 27 February 1960) is an English philosopher and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, USA.[2] Challenging the ancient tradition that philosophy begins in wonder, Critchley argues that philosophy begins in disappointment.[3] Two particular forms of disappointment inform Critchley's work: religious and political disappointment. While religious disappointment arises from a lack of faith and generates the problem of what is the meaning of life in the face of nihilism, (...) political disappointment comes from the violent world we live in and raises the question of justice in a violently unjust world.[4][5] In addition, to these two regions of research, Critchley's recent works have engaged in more experimental forms of writing on Shakespeare, David Bowie, suicide, Greek tragedy and association football. (shrink)

This essay explores the philosophical significance of the history of mystical anarchism for contemporary ethics and politics. It examines the complex relationship between religion and politics, and elaborates the thesis that many of our contemporary political concepts are secularized theological concepts. After a critical discussion of Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty and John Gray's critique of liberal humanism, it examines the anarchist practices of medieval mystics such as Marguerite Porete and the heresy of the Movement of the Free Spirit, and (...) contrasts this mystical anarchist tradition with more recent forms of anarchism, such as Raoul Vaneigem's Situationism.Retrieving the mystical anarchist tradition might help us rethink the relationship between religion and politics and suggest ethically grounded forms of anarchism that avoid violence or abstraction. (shrink)

In this enlightening new Very Short Introduction, Simon Critchley shows us that Continental philosophy encompasses a distinct set of philosophical traditions and practices, with a compelling range of problems all too often ignored by the analytic tradition. He discusses the ideas and approaches of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida. He also introduces key concepts such as existentialism, nihilism, and phenomology, by explaining their place in the Continental tradition. The perfect guide for anyone (...) interested in the great philosophers, this volume explains in lucid, straightforward language the split between Continental and Anglo-American philosophy and the importance of acknowledging Continental philosophy. (shrink)

Covering the complete development of post-Kantian Continental philosophy, this volume serves as an essential reference work for philosophers and those engaged in the many disciplines that are integrally related to Continental and European Philosophy.

The state of the body is central to guiding motivational behaviours. Here we discuss how afferent information from face and viscera influence the processing and communication of emotional states. We highlight (a) the fine-grained impact that facial muscular and patterned visceral responses exert on emotional appraisal and communicative signals; (b) short-term changes in visceral state that bias brain responses to emotive stimuli; (c) the commonality of brain pathways and substrates mediating short- and long-term bodily effects on emotional processes; (d) how (...) topographically distinct representations of different bodily states are coupled to reported feelings associated with subtypes of disgust; and (e) how pupil signals contribute to affective exchange. Integrating these observations enriches our understanding of emotional processes and psychopathology. (shrink)

Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to the other person has become a highly influential and recognizable position across a wide range of academic and non-academic fields. Simon Critchley's aim in this book is to provide a less familiar, more troubling, and truer account of Levinas's work. He proposes a new dramatic method for reading Levinas, where the fundamental problem of his work is seen as the attempt to escape from the tragedy of Heidegger's philosophy and the (...) way in which that philosophy shaped political events in the last century. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the issue of Derrida’s influence on philosophy by focusing on the nature of deconstructive reading as double reading, and tracing thisto the specific reception of Heidegger’s thesis on the history of being. After reviewing some of the dubious and mistaken polemics against Derrida, I go on to describe what I see as the ethical and political richness of Derrida’s work, focusing in particular on the theme of democracy to come.