Simon Critchley Quotes - Page 2

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Philosophy, Atheism, Modern

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• There are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment. Religious disappointment flows from the realization that religious belief is not an option for us. Political disappointment flows from the fact that there is injustice - that we live in a world that is radically unjust and violent, where might seems to equal right, where the poor are exploited by the rich, etc.

  Simon Critchley

  Religious, Disappointment, Two

  Simon Critchley, Carl Cederström, Todd Kesselman (2011). “Impossible Objects”, p.31, Polity

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Crush, Believe, Tragedy

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Thinking, Mirrors, Perspective

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Dark, Self, Oxygen

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• We live in a world that is dominated by science. And that's not a bad thing - not at all. But one of the problems with the scientific worldview is that it leads human beings to have an overwhelmingly theoretical relationship to the world. For example, I no longer accept my being in the world practically and then try to describe that or elucidate that; rather, I see the world theoretically as colors and objects and representations which are fed through my retina into the brain.

  Simon Critchley

  Color, Brain, Trying

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. August 1, 2003.

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Christianity, Communism, Ethical

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Opposites, People, Conservative

  "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley". Interview with Anders Gullestad, www.truth-out.org. May 15, 2010.

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• Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already.

  Simon Critchley

  Philosophy, People, Ordinary

  Simon Critchley, Carl Cederström, Todd Kesselman (2011). “Impossible Objects”, p.44, Polity

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Dream, Men, Hands

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Commitment, Reality, Thinking

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Teacher, Reading, Mean

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Taken, Thinking, Government

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• Any philosophical and theoretical assurance that laughter is unique to the human being becomes somewhat unsure when one turns to the anthropological literature.

  Simon Critchley

  Laughter, Philosophical, Unique

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Laughter, Laughing, Doe

  Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy Simon Critchley, Simon Critchley (2011). “On Humour”, p.35, Routledge

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Rights, Political, Heaven

  "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley". Interview with Anders Gullestad, www.truth-out.org. May 15, 2010.

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Thinking, Interesting, Trying

  "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley". Interview with Anders Gullestad, www.truth-out.org. May 15, 2010.

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Distance, Commitment, Heart

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Lonely, Community, Together

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Father, Successful, Attachment

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Mother, Mean, Commitment

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Distance, Movement, Creation

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• In relation to the question of hope, I think the only hope we have is hope against hope. We hope for a better world. But of course we can do better than just hope.

  Simon Critchley

  Thinking, World, Relation

  Simon Critchley, Carl Cederström, Todd Kesselman (2011). “Impossible Objects”, p.35, Polity

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Revenge, Philosophy, Thinking

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• The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox.

  Simon Critchley

  Odd, Paradox, Currents

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