Quotes from Simon Critchley

Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.

Philosophy, for me, is a way of relearning to look at the world, a world that is familiar to us, that we know, that is shared by all human beings and also by nonhuman beings.

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.

My body was a buzzing antenna into which radio waves flooded from the entire cosmos. I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe.

The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility.

I have argued that philosophy 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. It begins with a sense of a lack, of something missing, and that provokes a series of questions.

Death makes cynics of us all

The overwhelming experience of tragedy is a disorientation expressed in one bewildered and frequently repeated question: What shall I do?

Tragedy is full of ghosts, ancient and modern, and the line separating the living from the dead is continually blurred. This means that in tragedy the dead don't stay dead and the living are not fully alive. What tragedy renders unstable is the line that separates the living from the dead, enlivening the dead and deadening the living.

For Habermas, scientism means science's belief in itself: that is, 'the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science'.

Philosophy is erotic, not just epistemic.

The denial of death is self-hatred.

True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Never to be outdone, my wife, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst and therefore a specialist in ambivalence, wrote the following to me: 'Dear Simon, Break a leg, or all your legs. I better brake fast. With all my love-hate, Jamieson (who is about to drive us off a cliff)

El suicidio, bajo mi punto de vista, no constituye un crimen legal ni moral, y nadie debería considerarlo como tal.

Este mundo puede quitarnos todo, puede prohibirnos todo, pero no está en el poder de nadie impedir nuestra autoabolición.

Quien no haya concebido jamás su propia anulación, quien no haya presentido el recurso a la cuerda, a la bala, al veneno o al mar, es un recluso envilecido o un gusano reptante sobre la carroña cósmica.

Cioran escribe que «sólo se suicidan los optimistas, los optimistas que ya no logran serlo. Los demás, no teniendo ninguna razón para vivir, ¿por qué la tendrían para morir?»

there is a felt gap here-the gap between knowledge and wisdom- that cannot be closed through empirical enquiry. That is, the question of the meaning of life in not reducible to empirical enquiry. This felt gap between knowkedge and wisdom is the very space of critical reflection. In philosophy, but also more generally in cultural life, we need to clip the wings of both scientism and obscurantism and thereby avoid what is worst in both Continental and analytic philosophy.

No puedo luchar más. Sé que te estoy destrozando la vida ... Verás que no siquiera esto puedo escribirlo bien. No puedo leer. Cuanto quiero decirte es que toda la felicidad de mi vida te la debo a ti.

Una notable ventaja que debemos a la filosofía consiste en el soberano antídoto que nos ofrece contra las supersticiones y la falsa religión. Todos los otros remedios contra esa pestilente enfermedad son en vano o, en cualquier caso, de dudosa utilidad.

We live with – and within – a gap between knowledge and wisdom. It is time philosophers, and everyone else, started to try and think about that gap. Maybe more than our personal peace of mind is at stake.

I think Oscar Wilde is right when he defines love in De Profundis as giving what one does have and receiving that over which one has no power. To love is to commit oneself to another not without the guarantee that love will be returned, but with the hope that it might be. Love takes place in the subjunctive mood: it may be, it might be, would that it were the case. The logic of love is akin to the logic of grace.

My body was a buzzing antenna into which radio waves flooded from the entire cosmos. I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe.