Simon James Critchley (born 27 February 1960) is an English philosopher and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, US.
Biography
Critchley was born on 27 February 1960, in
Letchworth, England, to a working-class family originally from
Liverpool.
In grammar school, he studied history, sciences, languages (French and Russian) and English literature.
During this time, he developed a lifelong interest in ancient history.
After intentionally failing his school exams, Critchley worked a number of odd jobs, including in a pharmaceutical factory in which he sustained a severe injury to his left hand.
During this time, he was a participant in the emerging
Punk rock scene in England, playing in numerous bands that all failed.
After studying for remedial 'O' and 'A' level exams at a community college while doing other odd jobs, Critchley went to university aged 22. He attended the University of Essex to study literature, but switched to philosophy.
Critchley became a university fellow at University College Cardiff in 1988.
Philosophical Work
Overview
Critchley is a prolific author and has written over twenty monographs, including works on philosophers’ deaths,
Hamlet,
Greek tragedy, suicide, association football, and
David Bowie. He has also written numerous essays and articles on various thinkers and writers (such as Hegel,
Martin Heidegger,
Jean Genet,
Jacques Derrida,
Emmanuel Levinas,
Richard Rorty,
Ernesto Laclau,
Jacques Lacan,
Jean-Luc Nancy, and
Maurice Blanchot) and on topics ranging from the dimensions of
Platonic Academy and the mysteries of Eleusis to Philip K. Dick,
Mormonism, money, and the joy and pain of Liverpool Football Club fans. Many of these pieces appear in three essay collections:
Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, & Contemporary French Thought (1999);
(2021);
and
I Want to Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett (2025).
Critchley’s extensive work on Martin Heidegger has appeared in many formats: as a series of 8 articles written in 2009 for The Guardian;
His work and writing also appears in various other formats and genres: a volume on Continental Philosophy (2001) for Oxford University Press’ “Very Short Introductions” series;
Late 1990s
Critchley’s first monograph,
The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992)—now in its third edition—argues against the received understanding of
Jacques Derrida as either a metaphysician with his own ‘infrastructure’ or as a value-free nihilist who engages in endless relativization.
Instead, Critchley argues that central to Derrida's thinking is a conception of ethical experience that is informed by his engagement with Levinas. Critchley also lays out “the ethical and political underpinnings of the deconstructive project itself.”
Critchley's second monograph, Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997), begins from the problem of religious disappointment and the “death of God”, which generates the “grander” question of the meaning of life.
2000s
On Humour (2002)
[ On Humour is part of Routledge’s “ Thinking in Action” series, of which Critchley is a co-editor with Richard Kearney.] explores the role that
humour,
jokes,
laughter, and
smiling play in human life, all of which arise from the “brute, phenomenological fact” that we are “embodied actors”—
physiognomy, Critchley thinks, is intimately bound up with what we find humorous and with laughter.
In Things Merely Are : Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005), Critchley argues that Stevens is the “philosophically most interesting poet to have written in English in the twentieth century” and that his poetry offers illuminating into how we can recast the relationship between mind, language, and material things.
Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2007) challenges the ancient notion that philosophy begins in wonder, and argues that philosophy begins in disappointment.
Perhaps Critchley’s most famous work, The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) takes its cue from Cicero’s remark that “to philosophize is to learn how to die”—a claim that is “axiomatic for most ancient philosophy” (and that can be found as far back as Socrates and down to Montaigne).
2010s–present
In
The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (2012), Critchley aims to use his account of “dividualism” from his 2007 book,
Infinitely Demanding, as a jumping-off point to rethink faith as a political concept, without dismissing religion (as atheists do) or letting it fall into fundamentalist hands.
The book takes its title from a remark by
Oscar Wilde, and Critchley argues that it is in our failure to meet “the infinite ethical demands” that religion makes on us that a space is created for a
faithless faith.
The last chapter, “the most rebarbative, and the funniest,” is a response to Žižek’s criticism of
Infinitely Demanding.
[Critchley engaged in a public debate with Zizek. In a London Review of Books piece on Critchley's Infinitely Demanding (2007), Žižek challenged Critchley's argument that a politics of resistance should not reproduce the violent sovereignty such a politics opposes. Critchley responded to Žižek’s objection in Naked Punch and his own The Faith of the Faithless (2012).]
Co-authored with Jamieson Webster, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013) approaches Shakespeare’s Hamlet “through a double philosophical and psychoanalytic lens,” drawing on the play’s various readings (by, for example, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Nietzsche).
Critchley has said that since the mid- to late 2010s, he has been explicitly trying to write on his “elemental passions,” and that Bowie and football (or soccer) figure at the top of that list.
Critchley’s Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (2019) was described by Simon Goldhill as “self-consciously obsessed with how and why philosophers have wanted to regulate tragedy” and that rejects “the tragic” as a subject or as an “abstract quality,” and emphasizes the experiential, phenomenological aspects of the plays.
Public Philosophy
Critchley is explicit in his defense of the relevance of philosophy in the public realm and outside academia. Between 2010 and 2021, Critchley moderated
The Stone in
The New York Times. Contributors have included thinkers such as Linda Martín Alcoff,
Seyla Benhabib,
Gary Gutting,
Philip Kitcher, Chris Lebron, Todd May,
Jason Stanley, and
Peter Singer. The forum has generated three collections of essays, co-edited by Critchley and Peter Catapano, and published by W.W. Norton & Co.:
The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments (2015),
The Stone Reader: Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments (2017), and
Question Everything: A Stone Reader (2022).
Other Interests
Critchley is a self-confessed fan of David Bowie, Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, Otis Redding, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, and Julian Cope. Critchley is also a musician and a member of the “self-styled ‘obscure music duo’” Critchley & Simmons, alongside John Simmons.
The duo has released several albums, most recently “Gone Forever” (2024).
He is lifelong, religious fan of Liverpool Football Club.
Together with writer Tom McCarthy, Critchley is a founding member of the International Necronautical Society (INS) and serves as Head Philosopher.
Works
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(1992, 1999, 2014) The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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(1997) Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Routledge, London & New York (2nd Edition, 2004).
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(1999) Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought, Verso, London (Reissued, 2007).
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(2001) Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press.
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(2002) On Humour, Routledge, London .
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(2005) On the Human Condition, with Dominique Janicaud & Eileen Brennan, Routledge, London.
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(2005) Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Routledge, London.
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(2007) Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Verso, London & New York.
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(2008) The Book of Dead Philosophers, Granta Books, London; Vintage, New York; Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
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(2008) On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, with Reiner Schürmann, edited by Steven Levine, Routledge, London and New York.
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(2008) Der Katechismus des Bürgers, Diaphanes Verlag, Berlin.
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(2010) How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Polity Press. .
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(2011) Impossible Objects, Polity Press .
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(2011) International Necronautical Society: Offizielle Mitteilungen
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(2012) The Mattering of Matter. Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society, with Tom McCarthy, Sternberg Press, Berlin.
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(2012) The Faith of the Faithless, Verso.
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(2013) Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine, Pantheon (North America); Verso (Europe).
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(2014) Memory Theatre, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK).
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(2014) Bowie, OR Books.
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(2015) Suicide, Thought Catalog/Kindle Single. ASIN: B00YB0UZDC
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(2015) Notes on Suicide, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK).
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(2015) The Problem With Levinas, Oxford University Press.
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(2015) ABC of Impossibility, Univocal.
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(2017) What We Think About When We Think About Football, Profile Books.
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(2019) Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, Pantheon Press (US), Profile Books (UK).
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(2021) Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts, Yale University Press.
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(2024) On Mysticism, Profile Books (UK).
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(2025) I Want to Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett, Eris.
As Co-editor
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(1991) Re-Reading Levinas, ed. with Robert Bernasconi, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
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(1996) Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. with Peter Dews, State University of New York Press, Ithaca, NY.
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(1996) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. with Adriaan T. Peperzak and Robert Bernasconi, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
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(1998) A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. with William R. Schroeder, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.
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(2002) The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. with Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge University Press.
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(2004) Laclau: A Critical Reader, ed. with Oliver Marchart, Routledge, London.
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(2014) The Anarchist Turn, eds. Jacob Blumenfeld and Chiara Bottici, Pluto Books.
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(2017) The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, ed. with Peter Catapano, W.W. Norton & Co.
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(2017) Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments, ed. with Peter Catapano, W.W. Norton & Co.
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(2022) Question Everything: A Stone Reader, ed. with Peter Catapano, W.W. Norton & Co.
External links
