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Simon Critchley Quotes

Total quotes: 15
“The only proof of love may be the ease with which it can be betrayed.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Love
“Is the truth best said or perhaps only said in a fiction; that is, in a lie and a falsehood? Perhaps the ghost was no ghost. Perhaps its truth, like the theater itself, was a lie.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Truth
“Philosophy does not begin in an experience of wonder, as ancient tradition contends, but rather, I think, with the indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that”
— Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Radical Thinkers)
Tagged: KindlePasting
“Life is a detour for an organism that came from nothing and will soon return to nothing.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Ashes to Ashes, Life, Nihilism
“Reality is structured by belief, by a faith in fantasy that we know to be a fantasy yet we believe nonetheless.”
— Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless
Tagged: Reality, Faith, Don’t Let It All Through
“Humor has the same formal structure as depression, but it is an anti-depressant that works by the ego finding itself ridiculous.”
— Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Radical Thinkers)
Tagged: comedy, humor, Jokes, Depression
“Conscience is the inward ear that listens for the repetition of the infinite demand.”
— Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology
Tagged: Faith
“Is there some truth that is revealed when lovers argue? No. Arguing is to a relationship what masturbation is to sex.”
— Simon Critchley, ABC of Impossibility
Tagged: Relationships
“This book is not a suicide note.”
— Simon Critchley, Suicide (Kindle Single)
Tagged: first lines of books
“We don't need an answer to the question of life's meaning, just as we don't need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew.”
— Simon Critchley, nytimes.com
Tagged: Brush Away Meaning, Multiplicity, Perspectivism
“Historical amnesia and incuriousness about the violence of the past is the luxury of the oppressor. The colonized subject lives the historical violence of their expropriation viscerally, corporeally, all the way to psychosis, mental disorder, and phenomena.”
— Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless
Tagged: Nightmare of History, Violence, Colonization, History as the Structure of the Present
“Like elephant pregnancies, most books have long gestation periods.”
— Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
Tagged: Writing Books, It Takes Time, Patience
“The human being is the utter strangeness of action between two nothings. The self is a potentiality for being whose sole basis, limit, and condition of possibility is a double nothing, a double impotentialization, which of course is to say that it is also its condition of impossibility, an existential quasi-transcendental. Impotence— finally— is what makes us human. We should wear it as a badge of honor. It is the signal of our weakness, and nothing is more important or impotent than that.”
— Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless
Tagged: Nothing, Nihilism
“There is a psychoanalytic myth called the lamella. This is a word used in biology, botany, and anatomy to refer to a thin membrane or casing. Lacan used it to metaphorize the idea of a narcissitic shell, a myth employed to illustrate the stakes of love in the games of erotic passion and commitment. If we allow our desire to puncture this lamella, moving toward another, a piece of it is lost to us that we might seek to recuperate. Narcissistic love wants to get this little fragment back, to be compensated by another for having emerged from the safety of our membranous enclosure. The contract is set up: if I love you, then you must consent to give back to me what I have lost in doing so. Love becomes a system of mutual favors in which loss is ultimately avoided. Happily, there is another way. What causes us to desire— to leave the safety of an insular, lamellar world— punctures a hole in the very heart of our being. Through the other we can come closer to what we have lost. Love makes this absence present. To love passionately is this commerce of nothings, which is why love is defined more by the little nothings whispered between lovers than any bodily union.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Love, Narcissism
“By contrast, the sceptic is simply sceptical about the possibility of belief as such. Their counsel is to look at both sides of an issue and practise a suspension of judgement, or what was called an epoché, in all matters. In Philo's words, 'There is nothing firm we can say about anything.' The sceptic neither declines nor chooses, but simply suspends judgement and practises silence or aphasia. Thus, the sceptic refuses to either assert or deny that there is life after death, whether the soul is separate from the body or whether there is a heaven or a hell. In neither asserting nor denying anything, one lives in a tranquillity that is open to all forms of inquiry and an utter stranger to any species of dogmatism. Appropriately enough, it is not known how Pyrrho died, although it would be taking his scepticism too far to deny that it occurred.”
— Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers
Tagged: Openness, Scepticism
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