Simon Critchley

Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to them

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.

Metaphysics in the Dark A Response to Richard Rorty and Ernesto Laclau

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. Wallace Stevens, Of Modern Poetry

Enigma Variations: An Interpretation of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit

There are two phrases in Heideggers Sein und Zeit that provide a clue to what is going on in that book: Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf and Dasein existiert faktisch (Dasein is thrown projection and Dasein exists factically). I begin by trying to show how an interpretation of these phrases can help clarify Heideggers 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 (ein Ratsel). 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 Heideggers central conceptual pairings – state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) and understanding (Verstehen), 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 Daseins 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 Heideggers 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.

What is continental philosophy

Abstract 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 ...

The Original Traumatism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis

Steven Connor is doubtless right in claiming that ‘The word “ethics” seems to have replaced “textuality” as the most charged term in contemporary theory.’ But what does ‘ethics’ mean here? What conception of ethics, if any, is implied in this book’s title and in the specific linking of ethics to literature? Are we writing about the relative merits of deontological, consequentialist, or virtue-based approaches to ethical theory insofar as they can or cannot be productively applied to literature? Or are we writing about the recent critiques of the very idea of any ethical theory based on rights, consequences or virtues? That is to say, the critique of the legitimacy of the project of ethical theory itself, that has led philosophers like Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Stanley Cavell towards a privileging of literature insofar as it is able to stimulate the imagination in the consideration of otherwise theoretically intractable ethical problems? This is another way of saying that the book’s topic —‘Critical Ethics’ — is vast, or, more unkindly, that the word ‘ethics’ risks producing such inflation in the beach ball of contemporary theoretical debate that the consequence will either be a gradual expansion, a sudden explosion or, more likely, the slow flatulence of deflation. Perhaps this is already happening. Such is the Owl of Minerva problem in editing essays.

“We’re all mad”: Simon Critchley interview

This article is an edited transcript of an interview with Simon Critchley conducted by David Goodman and Donna Orange at the New School in New York City on 24th February 2017. The focus of the interview was on the intersections between psychoanalysis and politics in Critchley’s work. Specific attention was given to Critchley’s scholarship regarding Emmanuel Levinas, the persistence of the autonomy orthodoxy, and his understanding of sublimation and a superego II, along with careful consideration of how humor, among other things, may be utilized with regard to ethical political action and motivation.

Tragedy’s Philosophy

Tragedy highlights what is perishable, what is fragile and what is slow moving about us. In a world defined by relentless speed and the unending acceleration of information flows that cultivate amnesia and an endless thirst for the short-term future allegedly guaranteed through worship of the new prosthetic Gods of technology, tragedy is a way of applying what Walter Benjamin saw as the emergency brake. Tragedy slows things down by confronting us with what we do not know about ourselves: an unknown force that nonetheless unleashes violent effects on us on a daily, indeed often minute-by-minute basis. Such is what psychoanalysis calls a symptom, whose source is unconscious. Such is the sometimes terrifying presence of the past that we might seek to disavow but which will have its victory in the end, if only in the form of our mortality. In the words of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie, Magnolia, ‘We might be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us’. Through its sudden reversals of fortune and rageful recognition of the truth of our origins, tragedy permits us to come face to face with what we do not know about ourselves but which makes those selves the things they are. Tragedy provokes what snags in our being, the snares and booby traps of the past that we blindly trip over in our relentless, stumbling, forward movement. This is what the ancients called ‘fate’ and it requires our complicity in order to come down on us.

Das Ich-Evangelium

Die Selbsthilfe-Industrie boomt. Mit den esoterischen Lehren der New-Age-Spiritualitat werden Millionen umgesetzt. Beiden liegt dieselbe simple Botschaft zugrunde: Seid authentisch ! So charmant der amerikanische Optimismus auch sein kann: In seiner Fassung fur das 21. Jahrhundert – als Jagd nach Authentizitat – sollte er uns zu denken geben.

You Are Not Your Own

Paul’s political theology as been employed negatively as a critique of empire and positively as a means of finding new figures of activism and militancy based around a universalistic claim to equality. I begin by arguing that the return to Paul is nothing new and that the history of Christianity, from Marcion to Luther to Kierkegaard, can be understood as a gesture of reformation where the essentially secular order of the existing or established church is undermined in order to approach the religious core of faith. Paul has always been the figure for a reformation, I argue, motivated by intense political disappointment. The double nature of the address in Paul is fascinating: both how Paul was addressed by the call that transformed him from a persecutor of Jewish Christians into a preacher of Christ’s gospel; and the addressee of Paul’s call, namely the various churches or communities that he established and which are identified as the refuse of the world, the scum of the earth. But the central concern of this Chapter is the idea of faith understood not as the abstraction of a metaphysical belief in God, but rather the lived subjective commitment to an infinite demand. Faith is understood here as a declarative act, as an enactment of the self, as a performative that proclaims itself into existence. Faith is an enactment in relation to a calling that is proclaimed in a situation of crisis where what is called for is a decisive political intervention.

Surfaciality: Some Poems by Fernando Pessoa, one by Wallace Stevens, and the brief Sketch of a Poetic Ontology

This paper gives a close reading of a number of poems by Fernando Pessoa, in particular by his ‘heteronym’ Alberto Caeiro. On that basis, a poetic ontology focused on the concept of ‘surfaciality’ is sketched which is then made more concrete through a discussion of the concepts of understanding and interpretation in Heidegger’s Being and Time. As an elaboration of this ontology, the paper concludes with a close reading of important long poem by Wallace Stevens, ‘Description Without Place’.