Simon Critchley is interviewed today by Mark Thwaite at the rather peerless ReadySteadyBook. An excerpt below the fold:
MT: Very Little, Almost Nothing was your very moving and fascinating response to your father's death. A book based on Blanchot's theories, Stanley Cavell's interpretations of romanticism and the importance of death for Samuel Beckett ... and a surprisingly good seller, I hear, for a difficult book of continental philosopy! Were you pleased by the response to that book? Did writing it help you understand yourself and your place in the world?SC: Yes, it did and I am enormously pleased that VLAN has continued to thrive. We brought out a very tastefully designed revised edition about 18 months ago. Of my work published in the 1990s, it’s the book that I get most responses about and which still interests me. My first book was called The Ethics of Deconstruction and it also did alright, but I was determined to make the second book as different as possible and VLAN emerged out of all sorts of nasty existential shit that was going down in those years, so it’s a little testament to the powers of sublimation. I published it against strong advice to the contrary to at least change the title, but I’m happy that I didn’t. Readers seem to find something in the book that continues to surprise me. I think it’s an existential rawness that I do not seek to hide under scholarship.
MT: Our place in the world, our Being-in-the-world, I unconsciously went all Heidegger in my last question! Heidegger is such an important thinker: almost a fraud, if you are an "analytical" philosopher, but key if you are part of the "continental" tradition. And key for Blanchot. How do both these writers figure in your work and thinking?
SC: Blanchot is a clandestine companion whom I rarely teach and who interests very few of my philosophy students. He is a sort of secret resource for me. I read Blanchot often and what impresses me most is the limpid clarity, economy and strangeness of the critical writing. I intend to teach a seminar on Blanchot in New York before too long. Heidegger is a more public interest. I’ve just finished teach Being and Time for a whole year, that’s 28 lectures, 2 hours per lecture. It was a complete fucking nightmare to prepare every week, but the experience was exhilarating. I teach Heidegger in a very austere way, but keep veering off into issues in art, politics and life. But, to be clear, I wouldn’t want to be in the same room as Heidegger, not even the same building! I always find his work possesses by a dangerous power that I try to inoculate myself against and always fail.
MT: Is Blanchot's star likely to keep rising do you think?
SC: Oh, I hope so, but I am not convinced it will. I am always surprised at who gets picked up and read. For example, when I started reading Levinas in the early 1980s, one had the impression that there were 10 people reading him in the UK and you knew them all. Now, he’s big business and there is a whole industry around his work. This makes me feel deeply ambivalent, pleased that I am that he is being read. (read more)
Ta muchly for this, Matt. He's a funny, funny chap.
Posted by: s0metim3s | January 05, 2006 at 07:48 PM