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Other Work

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Critchley and Simmons

 

Simon Critchley, together with John Simmons, has been involved in a music project for many years. In September 2014, Critchley and Simmons released an album, 'The Majesty of the Absurd'.

 

 

Articles on Simon Critchley's suicide note writing class at the Kitchen in Manhattan

 

The Critchley–Žižek debate

 

The timeline or chronology of the Critchley–Žižek debate is usefully outlined by Critchley in a footnote to his Naked Punch article "Violent Thoughts on Slavoj Žižek":



  1. Žižek’s piece, ‘Resistance is Surrender’ (London Review of Books, 15 November 2007), which criticized the (at that time) recent appearance of Critchley's Infinitely Demanding.

  2. 'Resistance is Surrender' in turn occasioned some responses from readers including T.J. Clark and David Graeber, to which Žižek replied by accusing Graeber and Critchley of ‘the highest form of corruption’ (LRB, 24 January 2008).

  3. Žižek’s critique was then republished in Harper's Magazine (February 2008), to which Critchley replied in a later issue (May 2008).

  4. An extended version of Žižek's critique of Critchley's position appeared in Žižek's book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, London and New York, 2008), pp. 337–350. Critchley says he will "respond to Zizek’s criticisms of my ethical position and interpretation of Lacan on a separate occasion".

 

​Bibliography of the Critchley–Žižek debate:

Critchley: Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, London & New York, 2007; ISBN 1-84467-121-6).
Žižek: Resistance Is Surrender in the London Review of Books.
T.J. Clark's and David Graeber's Responses in the London Review of Books.
Žižek's Response a letter in the London Review of Books.
Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, London & New York, 2008), pp. 337–350.
Critchley: "Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek" in Naked Punch'
"The Violent State" article by Robert Young on the Critchley–Žižek Debate in Naked Punch
"Crypto-Schmittianism" This article by Simon Critchley, published in 2005, offers a useful preamble to Critchley's position(s)



International Necronautical Society

 

The International Society Necronautical has been nourished by the faded avant-garde movements of the last century, whether artistic, cultural or political. A German volume of texts Wir sind alle Nekronauten, immer schon gathers a selection of official communications from the INS from 1999 to 2010; meticulously documenting their manifestos, reports, statements, meetings, and trials from 1999 onwards. “We are sometimes asked: How do I join? How does one become a necronaut? Wrong question. As Paragraph Three, lines five and six of the INS’s First Manifesto make clear, willfully pilfering and re-using the tired language of deconstruction, ‘We are all necronauts, always, already.’ Our mission is to disseminate that fact: not as conceptual knowledge but rather in the way that Molly Bloom fills her husband’s mouth with seedcake, then repeats that moment, with a silent Yes.” An English volume from the INS, The Mattering of Matter, Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society was published by Sternberg Press in October 2012. In the October 2014 issue of Art Forum the INS published the Declartion on Digital Capitalism. 

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Trivia

 

  • Page 6 of the New York Post mentioned Courtney Love's appearance at the book launch for Critchley and Jamieson's The Hamlet Doctrine under the title All about love for Courtney

  • Press Releases of the Dead Throughout October 2009 media types around the country will receive cardboard tombstones cutouts to celebrate the release of The Book of Dead Philosophers.

  • The Dead Philosophers' Limbo is Susie Burpee's twelve-hour dance to the life of ideas and the death of philosophers as told by the living philosopher Simon Critchley in his book, The Book of Dead Philosophers.

  • Askmelissa.com How do you applaud the launch of Simon Critchley’s Book of Dead Philosophers? With a séance, of course! At least that’s how the Accompanied Literary Society chose to celebrate at an out-of-this-world party at Bobo.

  • Under the name of Critchley & Simmons, Critchley has produced a CD called Humiliation (2004) and a series of short films. This project was launched in an event at the Sydney Opera House in August 2004.

  • Critchley gave the name The Bleach Boys to a Hitchin based band previously known as The Fur Coughs.

  • Critchley himself played guitar in a number of North Hertfordshire bands including The Good Blokes and Social Class 5.

  • Critchley is a devotee of football, and has since a young child been a keen supporter of Liverpool FC. He has taken this lifelong love into his philosophical work, giving a lecture in Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, in May 2009 on French football star Zinedine Zidane, ”A puppet or a god? On Zidane”, based on Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno's film Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait from 2006.

  • In 2011, Critchley co-directed (with Brad Evans) Ten Years of Terror in recognition of the ten-year anniversary of September 11. Ten Years of Terror examines the theoretical, empirical, and aesthetic dimensions of violence and the ensuing state of terror it produces. This series of reflections by key canonical thinkers such as Saskia Sassen, Michael Hardt, Noam Chomsky, Zygmunt Bauman, and others closely examines the enactment and ramifications of violence in our modern times. The film was shown at the Guggenheim in September 2011.

  • The Last Word, Seven-Hour Finale: Critchley co-hosted the closing of the exhibit Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on Saturday January 21, 2012.

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