Simon Critchley. Bowie. 2014

http://www.egs.edu/SimonCritchley, English philosopher, talks about the work of David Bowie interspersed with his music. This lecture discusses civilizational collapse, revolutionary hysteria, and post-revolutionary breakdown, considering Bowie with Romantic philosophers Kleist and Büchner. Critchley points to the album Diamond Dogs and its relevance to the late-1970s; the image of sexuality, power, and decadence, along with the dual presence of schizophrenia and capitalist accumulation. He considers the psychoanalysis of RD Liang along with Bowie's own experience with his schizophrenic brother, who committed suicide in 1984, in order to navigate the creative world of Bowie's discourses on madness in The Man Who Sold the World, for instance. References to les tricoteuse, the French Revolution, and the Terror disclose a “prostituted, sexual hell” that Critchley interpretes within an anarchist “topological dimension” provided by poet Paul Celan that comprises of the link between utopia and freedom. The reappearance of Bowie on youtube through the “Where Are We Now” video by Tony Oursler memorializes the late-1970s, “a man lost in time,” and leads Critchley to the conclusion that the subjects (re)presented by Bowie (and, perhaps, himself) are not only “still alive,” but happy. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2014, Simon Critchley Simon Critchley, Ph.D., is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The New School. He was born on February 27, 1960 in Hertfordshire, England, and received his B.A. from the University of Essex in 1985, his Masters in Philosophy from the University of Nice in 1987, and his Ph.D from the University of Essex in 1988. Simon Critchley then went on to direct his alma mater’s Centre for Theoretical Studies. In addition Critchley has been the programme director for Paris’s Collège International de Philosophie, president of the British Society for Phenomenology and was chosen as a scholar by the prestigious Getty Research Institute. Critchley has also participated as a visiting professor in schools such as the University of Oslo, Cardozo Law School, and the University of Notre Dame and Sydney. He is a world renowned scholar of Continental Philosophy and phenomenology. Much of his work examines the crucial relationship between the ethical and political within philosophy. Simon Critchley’s published work deals largely with disappointment and its relationship to philosophy; chiefly, religious or political disappointment. In Very Little… Almost Nothing (1997), Critchley explores religious disappointment, the loss of belief, and nihilism through Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett. In this work he is simultaneously pointing to the symbiosis between disappointment and excitement, linking them as a necessity to one another. Instead of disappointment being an inescapable truth in the pejorative sense he explores its relationship to limitation as freedom. In an interview with the theoretical journal, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, Simon Critchley talks about disappointment as "an acceptance of limitation", in this view Critchley sees limitation in a new light, as rather a condition of possibility. Critchley cites Montaigne who says that "he who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave." Here, Critchley is pointing towards the idea that one who accepts the limitations of being a mortal being is truly free. Simon Critchley's published work includes: Re-Reading Levinas (1991) ed. with Robert Bernasconi, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992), Deconstructive Subjectivities (1996) ed. with Peter Dews, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (1996) ed. with Adriaan T. Peperzak and Robert Bernasconi, Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997) , A Companion to Continental Philosophy (1998), ed. with William J. Schroeder, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (1999) , Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (2002) ed. with Robert Bernasconi, On Humour (2002), Laclau, A Critical Reader (2004) ed. with Oliver Marchart, On the Human Condition (2005) with Dominique Janicaud & Eileen Brennan, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005), Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008), On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (2008) with Reiner Schürmann, edited by Steven Levine and Der Katechismus des Bürgers (2008).