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A LIVING, BREATHING PHILOSOPHERVice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered SpeciesINTERVIEW BY STEVE FOWLER PORTRAIT BY ISABEL ASHA PENZLIEN Simon Critchley is one of the most influential philosophers living today. That’s right, philosophers still exist! Critchley has written books on literature, poetry, death, humor, and the history of philosophy, and he is renowned for his groundbreaking ethical reading of the deconstructionist movement (that’s an important thing, even if you have no idea what it means). He teaches at the New School for Social Research and he is chief philosopher of the International Necronautical Society, a death-obsessed group whose first dictum is that “death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonize and, eventually, inhabit.” Excellent. Critchley’s philosophy seems to begin in disappointment, both religious and political, and his 2007 book Infinitely Demanding lays out his radical solution to the ever-undulating morass of ethics. That should be the second book of his that you read. The first should be the New York Times best-selling Book of Dead Philosophers. This hilarious and informative volume, which is totally readable by the philoso-layperson, details the deaths of tons of prominent thinkers while also telling us a bit about each of their approaches to life. It’s choice bedside reading. You learn a little bit, and then you fall asleep and dream about Socrates chugging hemlock in Plato’s cave while Sartre makes shadow figures on the wall using his hands and Foucault’s dick. Let’s speak with Simon about matters of life and death. Vice: In a sense, your philosophy proceeds from a statement of pessimism, disappointment, and nihilism. Simon Critchley: Yes. Nihilism is the obvious response to the death of God, by which we mean the collapse of any transcendent basis for morality, the collapse of the value of everything. 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. Makes sense. At least, that’s my conception of it. It is something that happens historically with the collapse of religion and the end of belief in the infallibility of leaders and so forth. There seems to be a larger shift away from what we have conceived of as nihilism. Now we’re in an age of ambivalence, with no belief, rather than a vociferous belief in nothing. It seems that the question of meaning is not answered yes or no, but not asked at all. It’s complicated. On the one hand we’re killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing. We want there to be a significance to human life, and we want there to be a narrative that holds everything together. Nihilism is the moment when we feel that’s been punctured. This is one element in youth culture that is persistent—a rejection of the old gods. You find it in punk, in the cult of death of musical figures. There are many examples. Meaning evaporates, and we feel abandoned. The idea of nihilism hits you, and that can be a dispiriting experience. Definitely. It can be one of passive withdrawal, like, “Nothing means anything, so I’ll go to my corner and cultivate myself.” Or it can be more like, “Nothing means anything—I’ll join together with a few others, meet in secret, and start blowing things up.” This is active nihilism. The idea that we live in a meaningless world can be another way of describing capitalism. Capitalism is meaningless, therefore we have to go out and destroy it. I like the way you think. But do we even get that far? Well, no. We are not even consumerist; we are a society of distraction, idle talk, and ambiguity. Everybody knows everything has happened, everything is automatically trivial, and, again, nothing means anything. This is the world of blogging, the fake world of Facebook, the world that compensates for an absent set of social experiences. There are virtues to social-networking sites, I’m sure, but you feel an awful vacuum at the heart of them. They compensate for something that is absent. It’s strange, one of the features of the contemporary world is a lack of attention. The world floats, it distracts us in endless ways, one is outside of oneself in a constantly divided attention, and you can multiply the force of distraction, which makes conversation harder and harder as an experience. Something that strikes me as being very dark is people creating accounts on social-networking sites for their babies and young children so they can use them as soon as they are able. Over the course of their whole life, everyone they ever meet, their entire mood history, is electronically recorded and presented. Is it an instrument of liberation or discipline or control? I remember the extraordinary enthusiasm for the internet, but now it is a surveillance-work tool, or a social-work tool. What one dreams of is escaping that. The 90s ideas of cyberreality seem preposterous now. We design more and more elaborate means of captivity for ourselves. The idea of voluntary servitude—and you can find this in Montaigne—is that ideology is not something that is imposed on us. It is something that we impose on ourselves. We gleefully make ourselves captive to it in order to fill up all those loose gaps of experience where something else might happen. People construct perfectly seamless lives of distraction where any real encounter is increasingly hard. The most radical thing to do would be to completely disconnect. Though you begin from an acceptance of the fact that nihilism, pessimism, disappointment, and boredom are prevalent in our existence, you never seem to lapse into irony. Humor seems very important to you, but never irony. Absolutely. Irony is corrosive. But it also depends on what you mean by “irony.” There’s a classical conception of irony in the German Romantics that is fascinating. It’s about the distance from the absolute, and you find it in Kierkegaard and so on. But by “irony” we usually mean an idea that one does not take things seriously absolutely, a knowingness, a smirking knowingness, which means one can never be surprised by anything, because one always already knows what the thing means, because you know it’s a sham. It’s what drives conspiracy theories, which are a strange form of irony in which you know already what’s driving things. Right. 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. And humor? Humor is opposed to irony. Humor is an operation you exercise upon yourself, laughter is laughter at yourself. So that ironic smirking self is undermined by humor, called into question by it. Humor is critical of the ironic position. I understand why people are ironic, I get it, but I think it’s corrosive and limited. See all articles by this contributor
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