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In the US, what passes for Christianity - and it is, to say the least, a highly perverse, possessive individualist and capitalist version of what I would see as Christ's messianic ethical communism, to say the least - is a new civil religion, a civil religion of freedom.

Simon Critchley

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Simon Critchley
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: February 27
Philosopher
University Teacher
Herts
Would
Highly
Individualist
Versions
Possessive
Civil
Perverse
Christianity
Passes
Least
Capitalist
Freedom
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Religion
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More quotes by 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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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.
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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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?
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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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.
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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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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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.
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.
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
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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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The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.
Simon Critchley
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We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.
Simon Critchley
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If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion, teaching classes in religion, preaching in a local church. That is fine and noble activity. But I do not feel entitled to engage in it. So for me philosophy is my fate.
Simon Critchley
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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.
Simon Critchley
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Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.
Simon Critchley
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Also, rights are not things that are given in the heavens. Rather, they are levers for political articulations, which enables what was previously invisible to become visible.
Simon Critchley
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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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Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek's position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville's Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man's hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.
Simon Critchley