Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness. — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
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… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion, teaching… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
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… — Simon Critchley Copy Share
The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox. — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
There are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment. Religious disappointment flows from the realization that religious belief is not… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I'd want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to… — Simon Critchley Copy Share
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… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
For me philosophy begins with these experiences of disappointment: a disappointment at the level of what I would think of as "meaning," namely that,… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
The other side of my work is political disappointment - the realization that we are living in an unjust world. "Blood is being spilled… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image
Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or… — Simon Critchley Copy Share Image