Simon Critchley’s “Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology”

Just ordered his newest book Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (2012) after watching Critchley and Cornel West’s recent discussion. There are many reviews of the book around, but here is one I enjoyed from the Los Angeles Review of Books by David Winters. He writes:

Critchley…[claims] that politics consists of reconfigurations of religion. In this respect, the political realm is partly fictional in nature; it works with what Critchley calls “fictional force.” But if politics only becomes possible by founding itself on fictions, then those fictions are nonetheless necessary, and needn’t always be read negatively (i.e., as lies). Beneath every deceptive dogma, there’s always a suppressed potential for other, more “fructuous collisions… between poetry and politics.” Crucially, Critchley doesn’t think we can disentangle religious fictions from political facts; to attempt to separate one from the other would only mislead us. What we can do, though, is acknowledge and enrich their relationship, recovering the productive power of belief…

Critchley has been engaged in a public debate with Slavoj Žižek since the latter’s attack in the London Review of Books back in 2007. Žižek’s taste for revolutionary violence makes him unsympathetic to Critchley’s “infinitely demanding” anarchic ethos, since it leaves the liberal democratic state largely in tact (despite criticizing it for its moral hypocrisy). I look forward to engaging more fully with Critchley’s perspective… I also ordered his bestseller from 2009, The Book of Dead Philosophers, wherein he seems to develop a sort of philosophical religion, or at least shows how philosopher’s past learned how to die.

Here is Critchley speaking about his experiment in political theology back in 2010: