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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• 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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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  New York, Ideas, Political

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

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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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• 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?

  Simon Critchley

  Disappointment, Mean, Thinking

  "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley". Interview with Anders Gullestad, truthout.org. May 15, 2010.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Country, Wall, Mean

  Simon Critchley (2008). “Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance”, Verso Books

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Mean, Sight, Self

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Struggle, Europe, Vision

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• 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.

  Simon Critchley

  Book, Writing, Keys

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• If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion, teaching classes in religion, preaching in a local church. That is fine and noble activity. But I do not feel entitled to engage in it. So for me philosophy is my fate.

  Simon Critchley

  Religious, Philosophy, Teaching

  Simon Critchley, Carl Cederström, Todd Kesselman (2011). “Impossible Objects”, p.37, Polity

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