Last Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Simon Critchley and Cornel West sat down to a lively evening of conversation and philosophical reflection. Orbiting around the main themes of Critchley's new book, The Faith of the Faithless, the two touched on everything from the constitutive role of love and belief in forming political bonds of solidarity to, yes, the power of soul and funk music. To paraphrase the incomparable Brother West, the two also did not shy away from "smelling the funk" over the course of the evening. Together with their theoretical reflections on spirituality, religion and radical democracy, each addressed New York's controversial "Stop and Frisk" program, the "prison-industrial complex" of the United States and the Left and Right wing media's joint complicity in ignoring and reproducing the underlying structures of an increasingly oligarchic society.  

BAM has uploaded full audio of the discussion as well as several video clips on their blog, accompanied by Critchley's running commentary and his suggestion--which Verso will be do its best to help carry out!--- that West will join him again for

a serious philosophical rumination at BAM about music, about poetry, about the great Otis Redding, James Brown, Al Green, Bootsy Collins, Parliament and Funkadelic and the sacred and true President Clinton, George not Bill, and greatest of them all, the poet and activist Curtis Mayfield.

Visit the BAM's blog to watch the clips and listen to the debate in full.

By Michael Bacal / 13 February 2012 / post comment

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.

By Michael Bacal / 07 February 2012 / post comment

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,

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By Michael Bacal / 07 February 2012 / post comment