ART&RESEARCH

Simon Critchley made his debut with The Ethics of Deconstruction in 1992, where he was one of the first thinkers to address the ethical aspects of deconstruction. Other important publications include Very Little ... Almost Nothing (1997) and the book which ensured his definite introduction to a wider audience: Infinitely Demanding (2007). Since then he's given us The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008), chronicling “about” 190 different philosophers and how they died, including Heraclitus (suffocated in cow dung), Max Stirner (died of the fever resulting from an insect sting) and, in the book's last chapter, himself, perhaps resulting from a moment of spontaneous divination: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Unless the bear should be in a hurry, we can expect a new book later in 2010: The Faith of the Faithless.

There are several reasons Infinitely Demanding, where Critchley presents his own ethico-political project, can be said to be a major breakthrough: it is crystal clear, well written and pedagogic. No matter if one is convinced by his approach to ethics – building on Emmanuel Levinas he argues that as human beings, we are met with an infinite ethical demand from our surroundings, a demand which we have to live with, even though we have no way of living up to it – Critchley shows how good he is at applying insights from various thinkers in new and productive ways. His diagnosis of our current political malaise is equally convincing: Infinitely Demanding paints a grim picture of an era where the huge majority of people end up as what he terms “passive nihilists” – those who let the world’s complexity function as an excuse not to get involved in anything but their own personal projects –, but where you also have those who go to the other extreme. These are the “active nihilists” – from Red Army Faction to al-Qaida –, the ones who feel that the world must be destroyed in order to recreate a new and more just order. The question then becomes how those who wish to create a political strategy capable of confronting injustice can do so without ending up in either of these camps. 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, who seem to have accepted that nothing we as individuals can do will lead to any serious systemic changes.