Simon Critchley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Western Philosophy 21st-century philosophy |
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| Name: | Simon Critchley |
| Birth: | February 27, 1960 (England) |
| School/tradition: | Phenomenology, Deconstruction |
| Main interests: | Politics, Ethics, Post-Religion, Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics |
| Influences: | Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, Nancy |
Simon Critchley (born February 27, 1960) is an influential British philosopher, working in continental philosophy, history of philosophy, literature, ethics and politics.
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[edit] Academic career
Critchley studied philosophy at the University of Essex in England (BA 1985, PhD 1988) and at the University of Nice in France (M.Phil 1987). Among his teachers were Robert Bernasconi, Jay Bernstein, Frank Cioffi, Dominique Janicaud and Onora O’Neill. Critchley's M.Phil. thesis dealt with the problem of the overcoming of metaphysics in Heidegger and Carnap and his Ph.D. thesis was on the ethics of deconstruction in Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.
After a position as University Fellow at Cardiff University, Critchley was appointed Lecturer in Philosophy at Essex in 1989, becoming Reader in 1995 and Professor in 1999. He was Director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies at the University of Essex and collaborated closely with Ernesto Laclau. He was President of the British Society for Phenomenology from 1994-99.
Since 2004, Critchley has been Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York, though he continues as a part-time Professor at Essex. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Sydney (2000), Notre Dame (2002), Nijmegen (1997), Oslo (2006) and Cardozo Law School in New York (2005). In 1997 and 2001 Critchley held a Humboldt Research Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. Between 1998-2004, Critchley was a Programme Director of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris. In 2006-7, he is a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
[edit] Works
[edit] The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992)
Critchley’s first book was The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992), which became an acclaimed source on deconstruction and was the first book to argue for an ethical dimension to deconstruction. A second edition was published in 1999. Rather than being concerned with deconstruction in terms of the contradictions inherent in any text — an approach typical of the early Derrida and those in literary criticism aiming to extract a critical method for an application to literature — Critchley concerns himself with the philosophical context necessary for an understanding of the ethics of deconstructive reading.
Far from being some sort of value-free nihilism or textual free-play, Critchley showed the ethical impetus that was driving Derrida’s work. His claim was that Derrida’s understanding of ethics has to be understood in relation to his engagement with the work of Levinas and the book attempts to lay out the details of their philosophical confrontation in detail.
[edit] Very Little... Almost Nothing (1997)
Critchley’s second book, Very Little... Almost Nothing (1997) develops in a very different direction and shows his concern with the relation between philosophy and literature and the problem of nihilism. Widely read and reviewed, a second edition with additional material and a new preface was published in 2004.
At the centre of "Very Little... Almost Nothing" is the problem of the meaning of life and what sense can be made of this problem in the absence of any religious belief. By way of a series of ‘lectures’ on Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Cavell and romanticism, Critchley argues for a conception of meaninglessness understood as the achievement of the everyday, a view which, he thinks, redeems us from the need for religious redemption.
Critchley argues that philosophy begins in disappointment, either religious or political. In many ways, these two axes of disappointment organize his published work. Religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to deal with the problem of nihilism. Political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for an ethics.
[edit] Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (1999)
Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (1999) is a collection of essays that includes his much-discussed debate with Richard Rorty, as well a series of essays on Derrida, Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy. These essays also show an increasingly political and psychoanalytic turn to Critchley’s thinking.
[edit] Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001)
In Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001) Critchley addresses the perennial question of the mistrust, antagonism and mutual misrepresentation between the two major Western philosophical traditions, that of analytical philosophy and continental philosophy. While the former tradition aligns itself with the natural sciences, the latter tradition argues that the natural sciences cannot provide a model for philosophical method – identifying ‘knowledge’ with science – and should instead be concerned with questions of wisdom, our place in the world and the experience of cultural, aesthetic and ethical value.
Critchley tries to avoid any sectarianism and argues that the professional opposition between analytic and Continental philosophy is something that needs to be transcended. Critchley accepts that there is risk within continental philosophy of obscurantism, just as there is a risk of scientism in much analytic philosophy. Both scientism and obscurantism need to be avoided in order to recover the primary purpose of philosophy, which to understand ourselves, our world and, as Hegel puts it, to comprehend one’s time in thought. Critchley offers the example of the ‘will of God’ as the prime example of obscurantism, but within continental philosophy also the ‘drives’ in Freud, ‘archetypes’ in Jung, the ‘real’ in Lacan, ‘power’ in Foucault, ‘différance’ in Derrida, the ‘trace of God’ in Levinas, and the ‘epochal withdrawal of being in and as history’ in Heidegger. Critchley’s Continental Philosophy is both an introduction to that tradition of thinking and an essay in meta-philosophy, which lays out the way in which Critchley sees the role of theory and reflection.
[edit] On Humour (2002)
In the last five years, Critchley has turned his attention to what he calls ‘impossible objects’: humour, poetry and music. His On Humour (2002) continues the meditation on nihilism begun in Very Little…Almost Nothing, but continues it in a very different key by way of an analysis of the meaning and importance of humour. Critchley argues that humour is an oblique phenomenology of ordinary bringing about a change of situation that exerts a powerful critical function.
On Humour has been translated into 9 languages.
[edit] Things Merely Are (2005)
In Things Merely Are (2005), Critchley examines the relation between philosophy and poetry through an extended meditation of the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
[edit] Infinitely Demanding (2007)
Critchley’s latest book, Infinitely Demanding (2007) is a systematic overview of his philosophical position, which extends it into political theory and political analysis by way of an extended engagement with Marx and an argument for an ethically committed political anarchism.
[edit] Other Projects
Under the name of Critchley & Simmons, Critchley has produced a CD called Humiliation (2004) and a series of short films. This project was launched in an event at the Sydney Opera House in August 2004.
Critchley has also published essays with novelist Tom McCarthy on James Joyce and William Shakespeare and has recently written on Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, and Martin Heidegger.
[edit] Selection of works
- (1991) Re-Reading Levinas, ed. with Robert Bernasconi, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
- (1992) The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, (2nd edition, 1999)
- (1996) Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. with Peter Dews, State University of New York Press, Ithaca, NY.
- (1996) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. with Adriaan T. Peperzak and Robert Bernasconi, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
- (1997) Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Routledge, London & New York (2nd Edition, 2004).
- (1998) A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. with William J. Schroeder, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.
- (1999) Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought, Verso, London (Reissued, 2007).
- (2001) Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press.
- (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. with Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge University Press.
- (2002) On Humour, Routledge, London.
- (2004) Laclau, A Critical Reader, ed. with Oliver Marchart, Routledge, London.
- (2005) On the Human Condition, with Dominique Janicaud & Eileen Brennan, Routledge, London.
- (2005) Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Routledge, London.
- (2007) Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Verso, London & New York
[edit] Projects Edited by Critchley
Critchley is Series Editor for the following book series:
- Thinking the Political (Routledge)
- Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy(Blackwell)
- Thinking in Action (Routledge)
- How to Read... (Granta, London and W.W. Norton, New York)
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] Academic homepage
[edit] Online writings
- "Crypto-Schmittianism" by Simon Critchley
- "The Problem of Hegemony" by Simon Critchley
- "Calm: On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line" by Simon Critchley
