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It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.

Simon Critchley

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Simon Critchley
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: February 27
Philosopher
University Teacher
Herts
Limit
Versions
Ridiculous
Oneself
Limits
Truth
Version

More quotes by Simon Critchley

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Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human being who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious.
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Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.
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The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic.
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We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.
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For me philosophy begins with these experiences of disappointment: a disappointment at the level of what I would think of as meaning, namely that, given that there is no God, what is the meaning of life? And, given that we live in an unjust world, how are we to bring about justice?
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Genuinely great humour recognises the world it's describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That's what great art should do. That's what great philosophy should do. The one thing about humour is that this is an everyday practice that does this.
Simon Critchley
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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.
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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 a much more interesting manner. That's what I'm thinking about at the moment.
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I think governments are quietly terrified. There's massive unemployment, a recession they don't know how to deal with, and the measures they've taken are not working yet, and maybe they're not going to work. There's a prospect of significant social disorder.
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The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.
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In relation to the question of hope, I think the only hope we have is hope against hope. We hope for a better world. But of course we can do better than just hope.
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Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.
Simon Critchley
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Shore up the mean with reverence and terror. But never banish terror from the gates of the state. The stronger the fear, the stronger the reverence for the just, the stronger your country's wall and the city's safety.
Simon Critchley
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There are lots of stories about how philosophy begins. Some people claim it begins in wonder some people claim it begins in worry. I claim it begins in disappointment.
Simon Critchley
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There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls the common good. This is hardly news.
Simon Critchley
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The thing about humour is that the super-ego is also at play, so what interested me, particularly in the last chapter which is key to the book -and no one seems to have picked this up in writings on Freud - is that, in the later Freud, the essence of humour is the ability to look at myself and find myself ridiculous. That makes me laugh.
Simon Critchley
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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.
Simon Critchley
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The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox.
Simon Critchley
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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.
Simon Critchley
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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.
Simon Critchley