What Simon Critchley is Reading
Although he seems to be everywhere these days, Simon Critchley still finds the time to indulge in his obsessive reading habits. Currently steeped in the world of ancient Greek tragedy and fully absorbed by its "massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation," he recently shared with The Believer a short list of some of the standouts from his current reading list.
With a good balance of the classic and the contemporary, the scholarly and the dramatic, he offers a diverse set of titles that are worth checking out to get a better idea of tragedy’s “savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy,” and, of course, its endless supply of insights into the present day. Not to mention the fact, as he rightfully notes, that Seneca and Euripides can just be a lot of fun to read!
Not to keep you in suspense about the list, visit The Believer to read Critchley's recommendations in full.
Simon Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless is also now out in hardback.
The Faith of the Faithless and Political Activism
With the publication of Simon Critchley's Faith of the Faithless, the journal Political Theology has provided readers an excerpt from the introduction of the book on its blog, and is planning on hosting a series of longer responses to it in the coming weeks.
In Critchley's introduction, you can find the conceptual foundations of the book's larger argument and its clearest elucidation of its titular trope, "the faith of the faithless." Together, these set the groundwork for the book's striking "experiments" in political theology and inform its bracing readings of Rousseau, Heidegger, St. Paul and Agamben. As the book's opening salvo, it also explicitly delineates the political dimensions of religious belief and theology today, and suggests how they may be properly thought in relation to the eventual possibilities for self-realization and the formation of collective bonds of identity organized around "infinitely demanding" ethical and political responsibilities and action.
For instance, in the introduction, he writes,
Learning from Ignatieff's #fail
Recent coverage of Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? by Derrick O'Keefe includes:
An interview with O'Keefe on Redeye: Vancouver Cooperative Radio
An interview in The New Left Project
Ignatieff was a key figure in rallying liberal support for that disastrous, immoral war. In fact, on the night that the "Shock and Awe" invasion of Iraq began, Ignatieff was out with his Harvard colleague Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi ex-Trotskyite turned war hawk and key source for the neo-conservatives in Washington, D.C. Each in their own way, Ignatieff and Makiya were – to borrow the late Tony Judt’s description of liberal war boosters – "useful idiots" for the Bush administration.
This alone would have qualified Ignatieff for inclusion in Verso’s Counterblasts, a series of polemical books aimed at key apologists for Empire and Capital. But I also wanted to examine the full arc of his career as a public intellectual; it seemed to contain lessons about the political retreat of the past 30 years and about the real nature of liberalism today.
And a blog post by O'Keefe on Rabble.ca
In general, however, there's been too much focus on personality over policy in analyzing Ignatieff's historic failure. We can start with a hat trick of concrete examples where political decisions -- all to varying degrees at odds with previous leader Stephane Dion -- managed to drive the party even lower in the polls.
Nothing about Ignatieff's spectacular failure in electoral politics seems to have humbled him. Witness his op-ed in the Financial Times last week advising new Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on how to win the hearts and minds of the victims of looming austerity measures. The FT headline, making reference to Monti's nickname "the professor," is unintentionally hilarious: "One professor to another: listen to the people, or fail."
Nicholas Noe in the New York Times on What to do in Syria
In yesterday's New York Times, Nicholas Noe, editor of Verso's Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, weighed in on the "enormous moral and strategic distaster" currently besieging Syria. Surveying the different options and the broader geopolitical implications of different responses to the crisis, he comes down especially hard against the dominant viewpoints promoting the "controlled collapse" of Assad's regime. In particular, he brings up, among other things, the critical role Iran plays in supporting Assad's rule, as the latter is one of the main conduits for Iran's backing of Hezbollah. As Noe carefully notes, any actions in Syria must factor in the possibility of a scenario in which Assad, Iran and Hezbollah use their combined force to try a "bloody last-ditch effort" to save the Syrian government. He cautions against the danger of responses that could unwittingly exacerbate the violence in Syria, or inadvertently lead to escalated regional conflict which would potentially introduce Iran and Israel into the equation.
Visit the New York Times to read Noe's op-ed in full.
"The best proponent of hope... stricken with hopelessness": Stuart Kelly reviews The Faith of the Faithless
In his recent review of Simon's Critchley's "movingly optimistic" new book for the Guardian, Stuart Kelly finds a work detailing new possibilities for an "anarchism of responsibility", skipping from Rousseau to Zizek, touching upon Agamben, St Paul and Schmitt upon the way. Focusing on the process of modernity as a reformulation of sacralisations, Critchley's book is less of a development of a position as a series of "variations on a theme":
The chapters of this new book do not establish and develop an argument. Instead, they parry and complement each other; it is better to think of them as symphonic movements.