Pieces by Simon Critchley

NEWS Emmanuel Levinas, 1906-1995 mmanuel Levinas, who died in Paris on 25 December 1995, was born on 12 January 1906 in Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania. His parents were practising Jews and part of an important Jewish community. Most members of his family were killed by the Nazis. Levinas grew up reading the Bible in Hebrew, […]

Black Socrates? Questioning the philosophical tradition Simon Critchley Inconsiderateness in the face of tradition is reverence for the past. Martin Heidegger, Sophistes Funk not only moves, it can remove. George Clinton, P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) Philosophy tells itself stories. l One might go further and claim that the life of philosophy, the […]

Writing the Revolution The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love Simon Critchley , … Saintliness cannot be placed in question. Emmanuel Levinas 1 The last thing Jean Genet’s work needs is another philosopher’s commentary. After Sartre’ s monumental Saint Genet and Derrida’ s equally monumental-although anti-Sartrean -Glas, it might seem prudent, indeed respectful, […]

Philosophy in Germany Simon critchley and axel honneth SC: Simply as a way of initially organizing our discussion, we both agreed to read a short article by Dieter Henrich that appeared in Merkur in his philosophy column, ʻEine Generation im Abgangʼ (ʻA Passing Generationʼ). [1] Henrich rightly claims that a change of generations is coming […]

What is ethical experience for Alain Badiou? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? Let me begin by trying to pick out the formal structure of ethical experience, or what with Dieter Henrich we can call ʻthe grammar of the concept of moral insightʼ, [1] and explaining how such experience implies […]

Obituary Dominique Janicaud, 1937–2002 The philosopher Dominique Janicaud died on 18 August 2002 at Eze on the Côte dʼAzur from a cardiac arrest after swimming in the Mediterranean. He was sixty-four years old. Eze is just along the coast from his beloved Nice, where Dominique had been teaching philosophy since 1966, refusing many invitations to […]

Obituary symposium Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004 David Cunningham In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had […]