Simon Critchley Workshop, Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas, San Antonio, February 22-23, 2010.

Professor Critchley will deliver the keynote address on Monday evening. Confirmed participants include: Anne Marie Bowrey (Baylor) Costica Bradatan (University of Wisconsin-Madison/Texas Tech) Tina Chanter (DePaul) Paul Lewis (University of the Incarnate Word) Anne O'Byrne (SUNY Stonybrook) Davide Panagia (Trent) Philip Quadrio (University of New South Wales/ Macquarie University, Centre for Research on Social Inclusion) Jill Stauffer (Haverford College). The workshop will be free and open to all. For more information, please contact Alistair Welchman (alistair.welchman@utsa.edu) or visit colfa.utsa.edu/pc.

Critchley, Simon. "Violent Thoughts about Slavoj Zizek." NAKED PUNCH 11 (2008).

There is a serious debate to be had with Žižek about the question of violence, the necessity of the state, and the evolution of radical politics, given the seeming permanence of capitalism. This is a debate in which I would like to engage as my own position on these matters is shifting as I give it more thought. Perhaps when Žižek gets beyond windy rhetorical posturing and his misapprehension of my position as "post-modern leftism" (I defy anyone to find a word in favor of postmodernism in anything I have written), we can begin to have that debate. I am not holding my breath. . . . Access the issue here: http://issuu.com/lcredidio/docs/naked_punch_final_web3/1?zoomed=&zoomPercent=&zoomX=&zoomY=&noteText=&noteX=&noteY=&viewMode=magazine.

Zizek, Slavoj. "Resistance Is Surrender." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS November 15, 2007.

Response to Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso, 2007. Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position. For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,

history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html.

Fearn, Nicholas. "Review of Simon Critchley's THE BOOK OF DEAD PHILOSOPHERS." INDEPENDENT July 13, 2008.

Critchley, Simon. The Book of Dead Philosophers. London: Granta, 2008. Once we get into the sober, modern era of analytic philosophy, the deaths become as straight-laced as the thinkers, except on the Continent where things are always different. When Jean-Paul Sartre expired from dropsy, Simone de Beauvoir threw herself on top of his corpse, where she drank herself to sleep. An exception on the Anglo-American side was A J Ayer, who died twice – the first time temporarily after choking on a piece of salmon. He came back with a tale of celestial cabinet ministers and a red light that rules the universe. His wife reported that he "has got so much nicer since he died". . . . Read the rest here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-book-of-dead-philosophers-by-simon-critchley-864646.html.

Gallix, Andrew. "Dead Philosophers' Society: an Interview with Simon Critchley." 3: AM MAGAZINE June 26, 2008.

Critchley, Simon. The Book of Dead Philosophers. London: Granta, 2008. 3:AM: The Book of Dead Philosophers has lofty ambitions. You set out to write “a history of philosophers” as opposed to “a history of philosophy” in the teleological mould. In effect, you are defending a specific conception of philosophy against another… SC: Yes, I am against the idea of the history of philosophy as a history of systems that can be arranged in a certain logical and historical order, such as one finds in Hegel or Heidegger. It is one of the many aspects of being deluded by the idea of progress (Hegel) or even the idea of regress (Heidegger). 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. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dead-philosophers-society-an-interview-with-simon-critchley/.

PUB: Critchley, Simon, and Reiner Schürmann. ON HEIDEGGER'S BEING AND TIME. London: Routledge, 2008.

On Heidegger's Being and Time is an 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.

May, Simon. "Review of Simon Critchley's THE BOOK OF DEAD PHILOSOPHERS." NEW HUMANIST 123.3 (2008).

Critchley, Simon. The Book of Dead Philosophers. London: Granta, 2008. Death awaits us all and yet few philosophers have devoted more than a fraction of their work to it - even those philosophers like Montaigne who hold, with the ancients, that “to philosophise is to learn how to die”. Of these few, almost none in the last hundred years is English-speaking, in part because until very recently Anglo-Saxon philosophers have striven, almost without exception, for systematic, dispassionate and, if possible, timeless descriptions of our ordinary practices – a bent that has left little room for much of life, let alone for death. If an English-speaking philosopher is going to write a book on the subject he had therefore better be very familiar with the so-called 'Continental' tradition of philosophy – with, for example, thinkers like Heidegger for whom awareness of death as a final horizon for all our experiences and practices is essential to an authentic living of life. Simon Critchley is an ideal author for a book of this sort as he is a distinguished philosopher who is deeply interested in such Continental thinkers as Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida and of course Heidegger. . . . Read the rest here: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1794.