Interview With Simon Critchley _ the Tragic and Its Limits | the White Review

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2/05/13 10:31 AMInterview with Simon Critchley : The Tragic and Its Limits | The White Review

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CURRENT ISSUE INTERVIEWS FICTION ART FEATURES POETRY PRIZE

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INTERVIEW WITH SIMON CRITCHLEY : THE TRAGIC AND ITS LIMITSJohn Douglas Millar

OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS SIMON CRITCHLEY HAS PRODUCED A SERIES OF ELEGANT WORKS OFPOLITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY. FROM THE ETHICS OF DECONSTRUCTION(1992), WHICH SOUGHT

TO LOCATE AN ETHICAL SOURCE WITHIN DECONSTRUCTION BY READING DERRIDA WITH LEVINAS,

THROUGH TO VERY LITTLE . . . ALMOST NOTHING (1998) AND HIS MORE RECENT STUDY OF POLITICAL

THEOLOGY FAITH OF THE FAITHLESS (2012), CRITCHLEYS WORK HAS HAD A DRAMATIC IMPACT

OUTSIDE THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT. HE HAS BECOME A PROMINENT PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

WHOSE WORK IS ATTRACTIVE FOR ITS PASSIONATE POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, HUMANITY, BROAD

CULTURAL SCOPE AND GRACE OF STYLE.

Critchley has said in the past that he tends to work obsessively on one topic at a time to the exclusion of all others.

Recently, that topic has been ancient tragedy, which he has been teaching at the New School with Judith Butler in a courseentitled THE TRAGICAND ITS LIMITS. Yet the result of this research has been unexpected, as one obsession has yielded another;

Critchelys new book, co-authored with his wife, the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, is THE HAMLETDOCTRINE(forthcoming

2013), and seems borne of both the possibilities of tragedy and its restrictions.

To Critchley, one attraction of tragedy lies in its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to

philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation. Since

the beginning of his career he has been concerned with the antagonism between literature and philosophy, telling me

earlier this year that Literature was always my passion. It was what philosophy was meant to serve in a sense . . .

Literature was served by philosophy rather than the other way around. His work on tragedy may be read in this light, and

can also be seen as a model for reading the present state of permanent war in which we find ourselves. In the followinginterview we discussed the significance of tragedy for him, his use of collaboration as a working method, and how his
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QTHE WHITE REVIEW Going to the theatre was an

important part of public life in classical Athens and Im

interested in what going to the theatre meant for an

Athenian citizen, what the experience of tragedy was

about, what the festival of Dionysus entailed. For someone

like Nietzsche tragedy is born directly out of the cult of

Dionysus and it is a kind of trance experience of

communion with the Dionystic. But for others, like Jean

Pierre Vernant for example, and I think for yourself, it is

perhaps a more complicated phenomenon.

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Bernard Williams begins his

account of Greek tragedy SHAME AND NECESSITY with the

sentence: Were accustomed to thinking of the ancient

Greeks as exotic people. In the work of early Nietzsche

we do find the view that the Greeks were not like us, the

Greeks werent moderns, they werent Christians, and

what they engaged in in going to the theatre had its

origins in a mystery cult surrounding the god Dionysus.

Nietzsches claim is that every tragic hero is a mask for

Dionysus, the god of intoxication, and that in the

experience of tragedy the lines between myself and the

Other disappear and we engage in some kind of

communal fusion. That view is very seductive because it

seems to offer something that is not available in the

individualistic atomised world of modernity, you can see

how it gets a certain traction.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW With Jim Morrison, for

example.

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, its this kind of orgy. Now

it strikes me there are people like Williams and, more

importantly, Vernant who have shown the implausibility

of that view it just doesnt add up. Dionysus appears

only in one tragic drama Euripides BACCHAE, which itself

is problematic as a drama, and it says much more about

the rich fantasy life of northern Europeans than it does

about the ancient Greeks. So what were the Greeks goingto when they went to the theatre? Well here we confront a

really difficult question. We dont know. I spent some time

last year trying to read as much of the classical scholarship

on these questions as I could and the conclusion really is

that we just dont know, we dont even know who was

there. There are estimations that a huge percentage of the

population of Athens went to the theatre, maybe twelve to

fifteen thousand people. We dont know for sure whether

women were allowed to attend. There are views both

ways but no evidence that allows us to clinch it. This is

what I like about dealing with antiquity, we dont know

and so we can breathe our own imaginings into it, which

is what Nietzsche did.

However, I think there is a more plausible view of what

the theatre was. It was a spectacle, its somewhere you

went to look at things that werent real, they were legends

and stories that had some connection to history like the

Trojan war, those spectacles were collective, the writing of

tragedies was a competitive activity and it took placewithin the framework of an annual festival, beyond that

latest obsession has lead to the new book.


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we are into speculation. If theres one thing that I take

from ancient tragedy and this is one way for preparing

for the claim that whats going on in tragedy is more

interesting than what is going on in philosophy its that

tragedy is the staging of a series of ambiguities, a series of

constitutive moral ambiguities that we cannot easily

resolve and we dont know how to judge. What seems to

be going on is a sort of staging of dialectical thinking, a

staging of a complex relationship between positions that

doesnt result in some kind of fusion with primal being as

Nietzsche called it. Its a medium that is able to articulate

the ambiguities that constitute our life in thepolis, our life

in the city.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW And what about the staging of

the female in Attic tragedy?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Well, thats one of the many

things we do not know. We dont know if women went to

the theatre, its probable that they did. We know that therewere no female actors and that the female parts were

played by men, or maybe young boys, its not clear. It

would have been in full costume, we know that much.

Now, its a really difficult question. The more that I learn

about classical Greek society the more patriarchal it seems.

You can get a certain picture from books but when I spent

time in museums and looking at bits and pieces, for

example the museum of the Agora in Athens, you can find

fragments of friezes with veiled women. Women were

veiled in public. This raises an interesting paradox in sofar as we like to think of Greece as being the birth of

western values. Women were veiled in the public realm.

So it was a patriarchal society with a very clear division

between the sexes and an accompanying hierarchy. The

question then is, if that is the case, whats going on in

theatre where those hierarchies appear to be inverted?

Women are often these unruly, ungovernable characters,

often foreign like Phaedra, or Medea, often exotic, often

savage, who throw into crisis the patriarchal order of thecity. One way of reading that is to say that tragedy should

be read as a kind of symptom of social order. The

repression of women finds its expression and

compensation in these female characters. The other view is

that theres a kind of revolutionary potential in theatre,

theatre is not just the return of the repressed but rather the

glorification of female characters. Another view says that

women are being played by men, men always want to

dress up as women, and it achieves nothing, its just a

kind of spectacle intended to titillate male citizens throughthe depiction of an order that is not their order. We dont

know, we dont know what the spectators saw or were


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meant to see when they saw Antigone or Medea, these

insurrectionary female figures. Was this a kind of

transgressive moment or was it an experience that

confirmed the order through its inversion, a bit like

medieval carnival did according to someone like Bakhtin?

We just dont know. Well then the next move is to say it

doesnt really matter, our relationship to the ancient

Greeks has to be one where they are like vampires, they

need our blood in order to live and when we infuse them

with our blood they become reflections of who we are, or

who we might be. For us at this point in history, or over

the last century, ancient Greek tragedy has presented

characters that have accompanied and deepened womens

emancipation. We make of the ancients what we need in

each new generation and thats the key thing and well

never ultimately know the truth one way or the other,

thank god.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW That idea of ambiguity is really

interesting and it begs the question: what are we left with

at the end of a staged tragedy? Are we left with the

moment of becoming through the violent act whereby a

character brings together their inner divisions by means of

that action? Or are we left with a problem to consider?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, theres the most famous

view, Aristotles, which is that tragedy is the imitation of

action, mimesis praxeos, which produces extreme emotions

as Socrates said, pity and fear, and has mechanisms of

reversal, reversal of fortunes and the recognition of error

which leads to an experience of catharsis. We dont know

what catharsis means; it only appears twice in Aristotle. It

could have a biological meaning, a kind of relief, or it

could have a more religious function, a kind ofpurification, we dont know. So theres a persuasive view

that we go to the theatre to, in a sense, detox; its like an

aesthetic detox where we are cleansed of our impurities

and ambiguities and we walk away refreshed. Thats not

wrong but theres an awful lot more to say about it. Is

whats going on a detox, or is it perhaps a staging of a

greater complexity, an intractable moral dilemma. We

need to look at the plays. What tends to happen in

discussions of tragedy and again, this goes back to

Aristotle is that we begin with an example, usuallyOedipus Tyrannus, and then people derive all sorts of

conclusions from that, whereas there are thirty one

tragedies, most of them by Euripides, and we should at

least read them and see if we can find patterns in all of

them. Thats where things get more complicated and

interesting.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW Is part of what is going on with

your work on tragedy a defence of sophism?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Its a literal defence in one

sense. Theres this remark by Gorgias, who is known as asophist, and what is a sophist? Well, its someone that is

called a sophist by a philosopher, whos not a sophist. So,


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a sophist is someone that claims wisdom, a philosopher is

someone who much more humbly is a lover of

wisdom, thats the standard narrative. So philosophy

begins by expelling tragedy but also by expelling

sophistry and we buy that, sophistry is bad, you can see

this repeated in people like Alain Badiou. Now, we know

pretty much nothing about ancient tragedy besides what

we find in Plato and Aristotle, we have Aristophanes play

THE FROGS, which is an interesting dramatisation of how

tragedy was seen, and we have this fragment from

Gorgias, the so called sophist. He says: Tragedy by means

of legends and emotions creates a deception where the

deceived is wiser than the non-deceived. So, tragedy is a

deception that produces greater wisdom. For Plato the

deception of tragedy is a strike against it, for Gorgias that

deception is its virtue, its an enabling fiction if you like.

Then also, if you look at the tragedies themselves

particularly Euripides, but you find this all over there

was a sophistical technique that argues both sides of an

argument, both for and against, being able to make a

strong case for something weak and a weak case for

something strong. This is what philosophers dismiss as

rhetoric.

In Euripides tragedies you find a lot of situations where

two positions seem to be contrasted with each other very

directly and were not told how those positions are

resolved. Look at Aeschylus THE SUPPLIANTMAIDENS, at the

end of that play the chorus is divided and one side of the

chorus says these people are right and the other side says

no, these people are right and its left like that. Or theres

a wonderful play by Euripides, THE TROJAN WOMEN in

which the women are gathered together, the city has been

burned, the men have been put to death and the women

are about to be sold into slavery, its a pretty bad moment.

Cassandra, who can see the future although no one

believes her, engages in this amazing argument where she

says that in our defeat and humiliation is our glory finally

because people will realise what bastards the Greeks are

and that by raping the city and then raping us and

committing violence and murder they will be undone.

Thats a wonderful example of someone finding the

weaker argument a basis for the stronger. The point being

that unlike Nietzsche and a whole series of others for

whom tragedy is a kind of pre-rational fusion with being,

what you actually see in tragedy is rational argumentation

moving between two positions. However, reason is not

triumphant. Cassandra is going to be sold into slavery to

Agamemnon and shes going to die. So we see that reason


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can produce incredibly strong arguments but in the end it

bumps up against the facts of history or the reality of

violence, which it cannot overcome. The founding

delusion of philosophy is that reason can ultimately find

an underlying pattern in reality or history and can,

through the force of the better argument, transform things.

Tragedy does not believe in such a view. Tragedy is more

pessimistic.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW Reading about sophistry and

tragedy in Simon Goldhills bookREADING GREEK TRAGEDY,

there is the idea that sophistry reveals that language itself

is unstable which is a threat to Socrates or Plato. You cant

rely on first principles, which is what philosophy is all

about, if the language you express them in is unstable.

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, you need language to be

able to define stable concepts. Its not that people dont

believe in language in tragedy, people are talking all the

time. Theres both a faith in language and a recognition of

its instability. One thing, one word, can mean exactly the

opposite of what we think it means. This is something that

Goldhill takes from Vernant. Its the idea that tragedies

like the Antigone and the Orestia turn around thesemantic ambiguity of one word, the word nomos in the

Antigone, law or custom, or the word justice in the

Orestia, dike. What tragedy will often explore is that

ambiguity. I also think thats what a good bunch of

Shakespeare is about. Philosophy is, for much of its

history, at war with ambiguity. Ambiguity is a symptom

of a crisis that it has to solve. A great example of that is

Thomas Hobbes. The great horror of the English

Revolution for Hobbes was that it unleashed ambiguity,

and once youve unleashed ambiguity you cant put thegenie back in the bottle other than through authority and

force, which is part of the argument for the Leviathan.

Meaning has to be authorised by the sovereign. Theatre is

an exploration of constitutive linguistic ambiguity.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW You have commented that

philosophy at its moment of crisis returns to tragedy,

could expand on that statement?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY This is a long argument, but to

be brutal about it, there is the recognition after Kant (its

more complex than that but lets just say after Kant) that

the completion of philosophy requires an aesthetic act. So

what Kant left us is what Hegel will call an amphibious

world, we have one foot in the world of nature

determined by science and another in the world of

freedom defined by autonomy and rationality. How can

those two realms be unified? The work of art becomes the

best bet to be a vehicle for unifying those two domains,

and thats what happens in Romanticism, in Schiller and

in the early German idealists and you can trace that on

through Nietzsche, Heidegger and elsewhere. So in a

sense the crisis, the division in modern philosophyrequires some kind of aesthetic moment of healing and the

exemplary experience of the aesthetic is tragedy. Tragedy


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is the highest form of art for all these people. It offers the

possibility of a reconciliation of that which was divided.

Hegel has for me the great distinction of recognising the

force of what tragedy can do in his early work, but also of

not being convinced by the idea of a purely aesthetic

reconciliation. So for Hegel, ultimately, tragedy has to be

overcome in an experience of comedy and thats then

overcome in an experience of philosophy and that is

where the reconciliation might take place.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW So ancient tragedy is, as youve

said elsewhere, defined by the context of war.

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, the frame of war as Judith

Butler would say.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW We are as we speak in what

seems to be a state of permanent war. Can we still access

the tragic? If so, what is it that tragedy gives us that is

useful or can help us to better contemplate the current

order of things?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Those are very good questions.

The answer to the first, can we access tragedy, is yes. The

answer to the second is that it does illuminate the situation

were in. Those are the short answers. This is where I turn

to and lean on someone like Raymond Williams. Theres a

view we can associate with someone like George Steiner

that tragedy is dead, thats the classical, reactionary,

formalist aesthetic position, the glory that was Greece is

gone and we live in a decaying modernity. The first thing

to say is that makes very little sense of the extraordinary

theatrical creativity of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, from people like Ibsen and Chekov through to

Brecht and Beckett and beyond into people like Sarah

Kane and Heiner Muller. Theatre is still fecund it seems to

me, the theatrical is still fecund. Im not a death of tragedy

person at all and that means looking in different places,

we could look at different media, film, T.V as places to

access tragedy. People have written very well about series

like THE WIREas a modern American tragedy, I wont go

into that now, it can be a bit boyish and obsessional but it

is fascinating. What it can show us, and this is where I

want to bring in Williams, who in his book Modern

Tragedy makes a link between tragedy and revolution and

its a kind of melancholic link. He says, for example,

something like: We need to understand revolution

tragically.

If we see revolution as a throwing off of repression and

the experience of liberation thats all very nice but we see

just half of the picture. Revolution is always a dialectical

process where revolution undergoes inversion in counter-

revolution. So a tragic understanding of revolution would

show the experience of liberation as always risking

flipping over into a new experience of oppression and

terror and the two things are intrinsically linked.


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Liberation and terror are intricated, are dialectically

interdependent and thats what a properly tragic

understanding would lead us to. If we want to maintain

something like revolution or rebellion then we have to see

it tragically in terms of the inversions to which it is subject.

If that sounds a bit abstract then if we think about, say,

Egypt, well we have the experience of Tahrir Square and

thats one side of it but whats happened in Egypt is what

Gramsci would have called a passive revolution, one

where everything seems to have changed but the

institutions of society have remained the same in Egypts

case with the military and the rest and because of that

theres a risk of inversion, a new form of oppression

emerging, maybe not immediately but in perhaps ten,

fifteen years down the road.

We have this progressivist liberal understanding of events

like revolutions as being once and for all events whereoppression is thrown off, whereas a properly tragical,

dialectical understanding would see the situation as a

much more complex question. And also, and this is the

other crucial point about why tragedy is so important

and this goes back to a theme in the FAITHOFTHE FAITHLESS

on violence that violence is a phenomenon with a history

and violence is never one thing. Violence is always a part

of a sequence of violence and counter-violence, each of

which comes with its claim to justification. Williams says,

and its a lovely phrase, to say peace when there is nopeace is to say nothing. So we have to understand the

possibility of peace in relationship to the history of

violence, which is our history wherever we may be. This

violence has a tragic character, its about cycles of violence

and counter-violence that unfold historically, and to

imagine that can just be arrested, that it could be stopped

in an experience of freedom is to risk disavowing that

history and to understand nothing. So for example if we

think about the situation in South Africa post apartheid, or

indeed, whats been happening in Ireland. To understandthe Irish situation we have to grasp the history of violence

that that emerges out of and the pattern of violence and

counter-violence with their accompanying chains of

justification which unfold.

So, yes tragedy is accessible, the world needs to be

understood in tragic terms in the name of realism. Lastly,

once we do that, we throw off a certain nave, optimistic,

progressivist view of history in the name of something

much more bracing and much more pessimistic. Buttheres still a glimmer of hope. For me, the intellectual


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discipline of the left has to be to take the long historical

view and to see events of oppression in the context of

liberation and to see events of liberation in the context of

their reversal and to see the long view and the big picture.

Which means we can still hope but theres no point in

hoping blindly.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW Youve been a vocal admirer of

Anne Carson, who has translated some of Euripides work

and who is a professional classicist as well as a poet.

Youve drawn on her work before the tragedy project also

her book of poems, essays and opera dealing with

Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil,DECREATION,

played a significant role in one section of FAITH OF THE

FAITHLESS.

ASIMON CRITCHLEY There are two reasons I find her

so interesting. Firstly, shes a classicist insider and her

translations are at the antipodes of the kind of Oxonian,

mannered translations of tragedies that I was reading as a

student, my dear chap and all of that. She takes real

liberties with the brutalities of the language, which I find

incredibly powerful, and she can do that because her

Greek is good. Secondly, her central preoccupation is

really the question of love and in particular love as its

experienced in relation to female characters. What I cameaway with from the DECREATION book was her

preoccupation Porete, and Sapho and Simone Weil as

three women who have tried to engage in the act of love

as an act not of satisfaction or happiness but an act of

impoverishment, as Marguerite Porete says to hack and

hew away at oneself to make a space thats large enough

for love to enter in. The idea of love as a kind of pain is

extreme in Carsons work and she brings that to bear on

the female characters in Greek tragedy.

Also, shes a great supporter of Euripides over and against

Sophocles and Aeschylus. The usual philosophical view is

the Aeschylus is beautiful and ritualised and stately,

Euripides is psychological and decedent and Sophocles is

the perfect mien between the two and we should read

him. Thats confounded by the idea that you find in

Nietzsche that Socrates helped Euripides write his plays

which is just rubbish. Euripides is a kind of meta-theatre.

He takes the stories that are put to work in Aeschylus and

Sophocles and then engages in a kind of reflexive critiqueof them, and those characters that looked like sacrificial

victims or noble individuals are shown to be their

opposite. In Orestes we see that, hes shown as a nut job. I

find her concerns incredibly amenable.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW So do you feel ready to dive in

with the classicists yourself?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY I wanted to do a taxonomy of all

of Euripides plays, but its just ludicrous.

Q

THE WHITE REVIEW If not ancient tragedy, thenwhat is the focus of your new book?

A

SIMON CRITCHLEY I was going to write a book onancient tragedy and I had a contract to do that, but then

my wife, Jamieson Webster, whos a psychoanalyst, had a


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different idea. Ive been teaching a course on ancient

tragedy with Judith Butler and Judith wrote this beautiful

little book on Antigone, ANTIGONES CLAIM. Its three

lectures and its very economical. She looks at the play

through a series of interpretations, Hegal, Lacan and

others, and Jamieson thought this would be a neat way of

approaching Hamlet. Wed both been thinking about the

play for much of the previous year through a reading of

Lacans interpretation. So then we were going to do this

little book, it would have been four or five months work,

and then I was going to go on and do the book on ancient

tragedy. Things didnt work out that way and the Hamlet

project sucked us both in.

What I found was that I can talk to you about ancient

tragedy, but Im not sure Im really up to writing about it

in ways Im happy with. Partly because of problems with

ancient Greek, Ive tried to work on it and improve it. Itsso hard. I think I have to leave it to the Simon Goldhills of

this world. Hamlet is written in English and so it became a

vehicle for these larger concerns. So all the stuff I was

talking about, sophistry and philosophy and Plato, that

keeps coming up in the book and its the frame, but at its

heart its an obsessive interpretation and elaboration of the

play. There arent many references to Shakespeare, I mean

we talk about The Merchant of Venice and other bits and

pieces, but really its on Hamlet and we take a series of

outsider interpretations as privileged interlocutors, and

they are in order: Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamins 1928

book on German Tragic Drama, Freud and Lacan and

Nietzsche. We tracked the place of Shakespeare in

Nietzsche, which is really quite interesting. Then we

ended up looking at Joyce and Melville and Heiner Muller

and people like that. Its a kind of assault on the

Shakespeare industry; you know that view that

Shakespeare, like Guinness, is good for you. Its an attack

on the view that Hamlet might be a confused indecisive

wretch but ultimately ends up as a redeemed individual

who might be a model for what it means to be human or

perhaps even invents the human condition. We take some

swipes at that.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW The Harold Blooms of this

world take a kicking?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes. We give a nihilistic reading

of it. Hamlet is the consummate nihilist. Theres a long

discussion of the word nothing in Hamlet. Its pretty

weird. To my amazement we showed it to my editor, who

was going to do the ancient tragedy book, he made abrilliant series of suggestions for restructuring it and said


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well do it, well put it out. So I dropped the ancient

tragedy book, I might pick it up again in a few years. Its

more fun to teach and think about, theres too much

material.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW With the new book, Im

interested in how the collaboration with your wifeworked?

ASIMON CRITCHLEY Well, she came up with the idea

and the structure and then when I had some time off lastyear I began to write it and wrote the parts on Schmitt and

Benjamin and she had written parts on Lacan and Freud.

Then there was a psychotic period of several weeks over

Christmas last year where we were sitting in the same

room banging sentences back and forth and writing

separately but having a very clear idea of what the other

was doing. At the end of that process it was clear that

something had taken shape which then needed to be

tidied up and really thought through. Its a real

collaboration. Its the most intense Ive worked on. Ivedone collaborations before with Tom McCarthy which

have been terrific fun but, you know, we werent living

together. There are similarities though; Tom thinks in

terms of lateral associations while I tend to think in terms

of argument structures so theres a kind of mismatch in

the way we think. Jamieson thinks more laterally and

associatively than I tend to do. Then youve got the fact

that the drama of Hamlet is, for us, the drama of sexual

difference, the drama of the relationships between male

and female characters, so thats being played out in thewriting as well.

It goes back to another side of the interest in tragedy that I

have, and that is that if you think about philosophy from a

psychoanalytic point of view, particularly from a Lacanian

point of view, you can see philosophy as an obsessional

activity. Its a subsuming of data under concepts, which is

what obsessionals do when theyre organising their desks

or whatever it might be, and as an obsessional Im eager

not to be one. What tragedy offers in someone like AnneCarsons translations is a kind of hystericisation of

philosophical discourse. Which also means trying to take

philosophical discourse to a point of vulnerability and

weakness and openness, which sounds noble but its

really not. Where we are with philosophy right now

theres a neoplatonism out there in people like Badiou and

theres that boyish, obsessional Marxism which is trying to

order things under neat concepts, youve also got a sort of

pop-philosophy about how philosophy can help you lead

a better life and I just hate all that shit. What I find intragedy, or theatre more generally is something much

more philosophically interesting and challenging, that


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experience of ambiguity, and rending and openness. It can

allow someone like me to imagine a different way of

writing. Writing with someone else is to imagine another

way of being your self. So for me the collaboration is

about writing a different way and Ive been pushing at

that for a number of years with mixed success.

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Interview With Simon Critchley _ the Tragic and Its Limits | the White Review