ART&RESEARCH

Simon Critchley’s firm insistence that oppositional political action is still necessary and productive is refreshing when faced with the resignation of several of today's most important political philosophers. Here he talks about his intellectual trajectory, neo-anarchism, his book Infinitely Demanding, his disagreement with Slavoj Žizek and the contemporary interest in St. Paul.

Anders M. Gullestad: Throughout your career, you’ve written about a wide range of topics: about philosophers living and – especially – dead, deconstruction, Continental philosophy, humour, Samuel Beckett, Terence Malick, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, political philosophy, ethics, neo-anarchism, religion – in fact you are here in Bergen to talk about St. Paul. Is there a red thread connecting these?

Simon Critchley: The best way of answering that is by thinking about the question of disappointment. I have argued in Infinitely Demanding and Very Little… Almost Nothing that philosophy begins in disappointment. It doesn’t begin in wonder or in the fact that things are, it begins in a realization that things are not what they might be, or might have been. So philosophy begins with a sense of a lack, of something missing, and that provokes a series of questions. The two main axes that have organized my work, for the most part, are the themes of political and religious disappointment. The latter is the realization of the death of God, that there is no guarantee of transcendence. That opens up the problem of nihilism, namely that the highest values that drove classical metaphysics – God, freedom, immortality – had devalued themselves, as Nietzsche puts it. This is something that drives a big part of my work, and then the question of what form revaluation might take. So religious disappointment opens up the problem of nihilism, and the question of what meaning there might be to life – the most general question imaginable.

Over the years, I’ve then looked – for example in Very Little… Almost Nothing – at aesthetic and literary ways of recreating meaning; the project of romanticism. That’s one side of my work, and that has led me into discussions of authors like Beckett. The funny thing is that the very first time I talked about Beckett, it was here in Bergen – in January 1995. I was writing what was then just a disconnected series of reflections. I stumbled into Beckett as my father was dying, reading Malone Dies and the other parts of his trilogy, then wrote something in a real sort of frenzy, which I presented here. It was a very important moment for me, and I always connect this place with that experience.

The other side of my work is political disappointment – the realization that we are living in an unjust world, a world that is defined by injustice, cruelty, barbarism, inhumanity and all the rest. “Blood is being spilled in the merriest way, as though it was champagne,” Dostoevsky says. That raises the problem of justice, what might justice mean in an unjust world. And then that leads to the question if there can be an ethics and a political practice that would be able to face and face down the injustice of the present. How might we begin to think about that? Even though I don’t say so clearly in my first book, The Ethics of Deconstruction, that was clearly what was on my mind. This line of thought goes through the third book, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, a series of essays on French philosophy. I then try to lay it out in the most systematic way in Infinitely Demanding. It is a short book, but very important for me, because I try to lay it out in one continuous argument my response to that question.

So the unity of my work is around the question of disappointment, and different forms thereof. But there is nothing disappointing about disappointment. It is what motivates you into action, as a condition for engagement with the world. So it does not mean resignation, which some people seem to think. On the contrary, if you begin from an idea of wonder or enchantment, then you’re really going to be disappointed. [Laughter].

AG: So, if we were to rephrase the Bible, we could say that for you, “In the beginning was disappointment”?

SC: The Bible of modernity, as it were.

AG: As you say, disappointment and having a bleak outlook on life aren’t necessarily connected. You, in fact, come across as somewhat of an optimist in your work.

SC: Yeah. It depends what day of the week it is, but basically, yes. I’m convinced that the conditions which we find ourselves in give us modest grounds for belief in emancipation and hope. One of the figures I continually come back to, is the figure of the passive nihilist, and I think we live in a time of pervasive passive nihilism. In the face of a chaotic and bloody world, one withdraws into oneself to cultivate practices of self perfection. This can be linked to all sorts of new age beliefs, but it can also be linked to those that cultivate a sort of literary or aesthetic pleasure. I don’t share this feeling, I feel that human beings, in concert, in the right conditions, are capable of extraordinary outcomes.

AG: We’ll come back to that, but before moving on to your political philosophy, could you tell me just a little bit about your background. You came of age about the same time that punk appeared. Did that have an influence on you?

SC: I was born in 1960. I was 16 when the Ramones’ first album came out. The only two options in terms of youth culture in England at the time, was to be a soul boy, if you were working class, or a hippie, if you were middle class. I was sort of from a working class background, but ended up at a middle class school, and was confused. [Laughter]. Then punk happened, or it began to happen, and one got the sense of something fantastic that was occurring with just a few, a very few records, fundamentally shifting one’s attitude. This is also linked to the moment in British political history when the shit really started to hit the fan. The economy falls through the floor in the mid-1970s; there are serious social troubles; race riots – punk just forms part of that constellation. We felt in a very different world than those people that came of age in 1968. That was crucial for me, and I played in bands for years, with no particular success, but with a great deal of enjoyment.

AG: So, what made you decide to become a philosopher in the first place?

SC: I failed dramatically at school, I failed as a poet – I was going to be a poet for a couple of years, but then I stopped, because I wasn’t very good. And then, when I was 20, I eventually went back to a further education college, a technical college, just north of London. I had some good teachers, and began to read. One thing led to another, I passed a couple of exams, and I began to get in a position where I could maybe apply to University, even though I had never thought of that. Nobody in my friendship group had done so, it wasn’t the sort of thing we did. It’s a long story, but then I went to University when I was 22. I was four years older than the other undergraduates and had been through all the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll that they hadn’t been through. I worked like a dog, I threw myself into it and had a series of nervous breakdowns. [Laughter]. By then I did philosophy as a fourth option in my first year of University. Like everybody else at that time, I’d had what you could call a Penguin Modern Classics-education – I’d read Kafka, Camus and Sartre. Sartre’s novels were very important for me. I realized this had to do with philosophy, but not really, got to University, and my first teacher – a man called Jay Bernstein, who was terrifying and inspiring – caused me to lose my Sartrean, atheist individualism. Under his influence, I became a Hegelian, almost over-night, and shifted into philosophy from literature, but I always kept a connection with literature, particularly medieval literature, that was strangely my real passion.

AG: From whence came your interest in deconstruction and Levinas, and how did this fit into the general intellectual climate of the UK of the time?

SC: I ended up at the University of Essex, a really interesting place, at a very interesting time in its history. There were fantastic opportunities and I was taught by people that were amazing, that have gone on to do extraordinary things. They all happened to be at this place at this time, and I ate it all up. I did my entire degree – all the way from BA to PhD – in six years, I did the whole thing really fast. Towards the end of my degree, I realized there were interesting things happening in French philosophy. I read Derrida and Foucault in the Communist student society – they were looking at them as part of the study of the nature of ideology, it was strange to read them in that context. Then I decided to go to France, where I stayed for a year and a half, and became obsessed with Derrida, in particular. At that point, he was really the philosophical avant-garde, a sort of philosopher’s philosopher. I was taught by Heideggerians and developed a real interest in Heidegger, but as seen from a French context. I soaked that up and went through various different PhD-projects fairly quickly, but realized that for me the issue – and this goes back to the first question – was that I was convinced there was an ethical motivation to deconstruction. At that point, it was considered as a sort of textual free play or value free nihilism. I was convinced that was wrong, that it actually had a much closer attachment to more classical forms of philosophy, particularly the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Hegel, and also that there was a practical, ethical dimension driving it.

This became an obsession, and I started putting Derrida together with Levinas, whom I’d strayed into as an undergraduate, in relation to Martin Buber’s work, which had an impact on me. At that point, nobody was talking about ethics in relation to deconstruction – it just didn’t happen. I then wrote a thesis which became the first draft of The Ethics of Deconstruction, which was published four years later. And then that came out, and this was the weird thing – I had the extraordinary piece of luck that Derrida was initially denied an honorary doctorate at Cambridge in 1992, the argument being that deconstruction was nihilism and that a university such as Cambridge shouldn’t be giving doctorates to such people. It is difficult to imagine it today, but this was front page news in Britain. When he finally got the honorary doctorate, the front page of The Independent, in May 1992, I think it must have been, read something like “Value free nihilism hits English city”. [Laughter]. My book finally came out the month after that. It got a lot of attention, because it was a problem a lot of people were concerned with. That was just sheer, sheer luck, for which I have the reactionary forces of Cambridge to thank, because they created that situation. Strange, strange how things work out. [Laughter].

AG: Very much so. So, now that you’re nearing 50, would you say that there’s been one continual evolution to your thought, or have there been any major paradigm shifts, philosophically speaking?

SC: Many, and there continue to be so. It feels like I’m just at the beginning, really. I think things are shifting all the time. There was a real shift towards political philosophy in the early 1990s. I worked closely together with Ernesto Laclau at Essex. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was published in 1985, and at Essex, there was a whole group of people around him that were fascinated with his thinking. I was a young faculty member at the time, and I really soaked up his work, read a lot of Gramsci, a lot of democratic theory. Even though I had political sympathies, I wasn’t really a political thinker, so I taught myself a lot more about that in the real hothouse environment at Essex.

Then in the mid-1990s, psychoanalysis became hugely important for me. I was teaching a lot of Freud, became interested in Lacan, and that was a shift: realizing the depth in the psychoanalytic view of human beings. A series of other shifts would be connected with different authors, figures like Blanchot, and then there were also further political ones, particularly in connection with the anti-globalization movement. It’s a misnomer, but anyway, the sort of shift in the politics of resistance that happened after November 1999. That was something that became more and more important to me through the impact of Hardt and Negri’s Empire – although I disagree with that book profoundly – and then a turn back to Marx, whom I really got engaged with about ten years ago on issues of political resistance. A lot of that was reflected in Infinitely Demanding, where you can also see a shift towards a more anarchist position from 2005 and onwards. I’ve always been surrounded by people – graduate students, colleagues, people that you meet – and the way I tend to think, I basically always trusted what other people are interested in. If I’m told to read something, I normally do. I’ve done a lot of work over the years in reading groups, just soaking up what’s going on. The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program. That’s something that’s become more and more important to me.

AG: So, these connections to the so-called anti-globalization movement and then later to these neo-anarchist practices, are they both on a theoretical and practical level, or do you stick mainly to the former?

SC: Initially, it was theoretical, but it has become increasingly practical, in the sense that being in New York, I was introduced to a whole activist scene. To give one practical example, there’s been a struggle at the New School, concerned with the governance of the University. We have a president who is not capable of the job, and there’s been a movement amongst faculty and students to get rid of him. So there’s a very practical, local issue of how we can reclaim the autonomy of an institution, but which at the same time has been a very theoretical enterprise, in that a lot of the students involved I’d taught in reading groups, there were activists that I knew. David Graeber, for example, who is an anarchist thinker and practitioner, was very important in the early years in New York. Through actions like that, I read things like Comité invisible and the Tiqqun group in France. A lot of ideas such as these were being picked up by student groups.

So yeah, it’s theoretical – I teach philosophy and I write, but it’s not the only thing that I do, although I can’t claim to be at the barricades throwing Molotov cocktails at the police all the time. In New York it is a very dangerous activity anyway [laughter], because the police are brutal, but I still have a connection to practical politics. In fact it’s gone in a strange way, as, during the 1980s in England, I was someone who came from the extreme left, but joined the Labour Party in 1984. Because the imperative was the removal of Thatcherism, a lot of people like me decided that it was the only vehicle that could remove Thatcher, so we infiltrated it, and I worked in the Labour Party for eight years. Now, I feel completely ashamed and appalled as to what has happened. I still consider it to be my party, but I left in 1992. Since then, I’ve become more and more distrustful of the politics of the state and the traditional mechanisms of representation within democracy. I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case.

AG:Infinitely Demanding was published in 2007, but you took a few years writing it, didn’t you? Can you remember when you started working on it?

SC: Every book you do really has a long tail, but this really goes back to when Ethics, Politics and Subjectivity came out in 1999. I had to present the book at a meeting, and I realized that I didn’t know what the overall argument was. I couldn’t really get a grip on it, and then I had to back up and clarify what my meta-ethical position was. So I was thinking about that and about categories like commitment, getting interested in some existential approaches to ethics, which I’d left in the past, a long time ago. It is something that took shape over a number of years. I agree with much of it, but not all of it now.

AG: In the book you state what we could call your own ethico-political project in a very clear and succinct manner, and you advocate what you term a form of neo-anarchism. Could you describe the current political malaise this project arose out of, what you label the “motivational deficit” of liberal democracy?

SC: I begin from the idea that the institutions, practices and habits of liberal democracy simply do not motivate citizens. Did they ever? I think for periods, yes, especially after periods of crisis and war. I’m thinking very much of Western Europe when I’m thinking about this. There is a situation of slackening and drift, which for me is also linked to the problematic shift from the nation state to the EU, where most people’s bonds of attachment and identification are politically still at the level of the nation state. One thinks of oneself as a Swede or as a Dane, and then maybe in some ways as a European, but those European bonds are terribly weak, the institutions of the EU are intentionally demotivating, which is why the number of people that vote in European elections is so low. So people’s identification is still with the nation state, but this has taken a negative form now, so that people are identifying with it in some sort of nostalgic way, usually around issues of “us” and “them” and issues of immigration.

AG: I know you don’t always agree with Chantal Mouffe, but would you concur with her assessment that this motivational deficit has helped cause the current rise of the populist neo-right?

SC: Yes, it has. When it comes to Chantal, I agree with her in many ways in terms of political diagnosis and I agree with her critique of liberalism. What I disagree about is her political agenda, in particular the way she wants to deprive it of any ethical motivation. For me, there has to be an ethico-political core to any notion of political practice. What’s wrong with someone like Chantal is a hypnotized fascination with figures like Carl Schmitt, who seems to be doing real politics. For me, there are problems with that, but the diagnosis I agree with. The populist right is growing all around in Europe. I have a part time job at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, and I have been experiencing that context close up. This is particularly frightening, because you have a demotivation on the political level which is producing a populist reaction centered around immigration and the meaning of “Dutchness”.

So, that’s the diagnosis, and then I’m continually suspicious of the “gifts” of liberal democracy, freedom and voting, which people seem to identify with democracy, which has never been particularly plausible to me. And, you know, talk of a liberal cosmopolitan order sort of makes me want to vomit. I’m also very suspicious of Obama, and I’ve been critical of him since before he was elected and during the campaign, because he’s not what he appears to be to some people on the left.

AG: If you were an American citizen, would you have voted for him?

SC: It depends where I lived. That’s a local question.

AG: In New York?

SC: In New York? It’s also a question that largely doesn’t matter, because if the Democrats put up a goat as presidential candidate, it would probably get elected in New York State. [Laughter]. I think the US is the most unrepresentative representative democracy, because in a country of 300 million – in fact, they don’t know how many people are in the US – with perhaps 30 million illegal immigrants – again they don’t know, because it’s the only way the system works, through illegal labour – there are 435 members of Congress and 100 senators. It’s pathetic. In a country like Britain, which is hardly a beacon of democracy, there are nearly 700 members of parliament and about the same number of members of the House of Lords. The constitution of the American democracy was designed to prevent the people actually having power. That’s the way Madison crafted it, with great genius, at the end of the 18^th century. So it was designed to prevent change, which Obama is discovering to his cost. The system is very difficult to shift. China, as an authoritarian capitalist state, is much easier to change.

AG: That’s a very interesting point, but to return to the motivational deficit: you think what is needed to counter it is a new conception of ethics. Could you elaborate on that?

SC: If we’re living in a situation of general demotivation in the West, the question then becomes how we can provide motivation. The question of ethics can not be reduced to the manipulation of different theories – utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, etc. – or to issues of policy or voter intentions. They have to be linked back to something deeper, at the level of the ethical subject. Infinitely Demanding makes two claims. It claims that, at the core of any conception of morality, is an experience of a demand, which we approve, which ties us, and which makes us ethical subjects of a certain kind. I try to elaborate that in relation to Kant, as a sort of locus classicus. It’s a meta-ethical claim that at the core of any conception of ethics is something which is doing the work of a demand, a demand I approve of in some way, whether tacit or explicit.

The second claim is more normative. I come up with a certain picture of the ethical subject, which I would like to propose, based on this infinite ethical demand. It is that which makes me the ethical subject that I am, but not in a way that is reducible to autonomy. It is something which continually exceeds my capacity to approve of it. So I’ve got this basic idea, which comes from Levinas initially, that morality has to be referred back to an idea of an ethical relation, a relationship between myself and another, a relationship of asymmetry, of inequality. It is that basic situation that I want to put at the core of this neo-anarchism.

AG: Before you go on to say something about how we as subjects are supposed to handle this asymmetry, let’s have a closer look at your notion of what it means to be a subject, which you draw from Alain Badiou, Løgstrup and Levinas. If we start with Badiou, for him being a subject is a very rare thing. In fact, most of the people we see around us aren’t subjects, according to his definition – I don’t know if I am one, for example.

SC: There has to be a break, a rupture with the situation.

AG: It is a very interesting thought, but also a provocative one. Do you agree with him that only some people are subjects, while others aren’t? And those that aren’t subjects, that haven’t been gripped by their Evental-Truth, what are they?

SC: Well, they’re what he calls a quelconque, a someone, an individual. I’m cautious about that aspect in Badiou – what you say is right. For Badiou there has to be something which breaks the situation, which makes me a subject, in accordance with the four conditions of the Event. It’s true that he thinks political Events are rare, they’re less rare in the sphere of love, but yes, they’re rare. I disagree with this emphasis on rarity in Badiou. I think – I guess ultimately for psychoanalytic reasons – that subjects are things which emerge with much more regularity than Badiou would allow. So I think that most people walking around are subjects, there has been some cut, some event, which we can understand in terms of castration or rebellion or whatever it might be. Badiou, who I’ve been reading for the last 15 years or so, is somebody I find enormously interesting. The category of the Event is fascinating, because it is a way of thinking of novelty – he’s a thinker of the new, and then the new becomes rare. I’m not so convinced by that anymore, I think the new is always something that’s an articulation of the old. So subjects are things which make explicit capacities at the level of the individual, which means they are nothing as dramatic as Badiou would want to allow. The strict dualism between being and event in Badiou is formally and philosophically very beautiful, but I think it’s more complicated than that.

AG: How about Badiou’s notion of truth, which, as Infinitely Demanding makes clear, you disagree with?

SC: Hmmm, do I still disagree with that?

AG: … which you used to disagree with, but not any more? How come?

SC: I used to disagree with that, because I don’t think I properly understood it, and he gave a talk on Infinitely Demanding where one of the points of issue was his conception of truth. Now, truth is a word that sounds very strong, so it functions, as it were, in terms of intellectual and activist vocabulary, as a shift from people who were terrified of making truth claims and who thought truth was a thing of the past, to a situation where suddenly we are talking about truth again. But, you know, what Badiou means by truth is an act of faith, or an act of troth, as you can say in English. Truth is an act of fidelity. To that extent, I don’t have a problem with it. I’m going to try and lay that out a little bit more in the next book.

AG: So, from Badiou you subtract at least parts of his notion of the subject and definitely his notion of fidelity. Could you say a little bit about that?

SC: For him, fidelity is the fidelity to an Event. I try to rework that into fidelity to an infinite demand. I mean, there is a demand in the Event for Badiou. It’s complicated, in that the subject is the subject of an Event, but the Event is only the Event for the subject. So there’s this strange moment of birth when subject and Event come into existence at the same time. I was just thinking about this today – I call that a structurally Christian conception, which is about the birth of the new, the model for which is ultimately the resurrection of Christ. Whereas I’m structurally Judaic, it’s always an articulation of the subject in relation to something that antecedes it, which could be understood in a Judaic way in relation to the law, or it could be understood in a psychoanalytic way in relation to desire and the unconscious. A huge issue is Badiou’s relation to psychoanalysis, which I think is problematic, but that would take another conversation to properly get into.

AG: All right, let’s go on. Could you say a bit about what you find in Løgstrup and Levinas, too?

SC: Løgstrup is about the ethical demand. He is thinking specifically about Christ’s ethical demand in the Sermon of the Mount that you should not just love your neighbour as yourself, but that you should willingly be persecuted by your neighbour. So this troublesome rabbi Jesus is in the business of imposing a huge ethical demand, which, if you’re a Christian, is legitimate because he’s God. If you’re not a Christian, like me, it’s legitimate, because he’s making a huge demand which can obviously not be fulfilled, so it’s that demand arising in the existential encounter with the other that I’m taking from Løgstrup.