![]()
CARL CEDERSTRÖM: This interview will focus on your life and how you got into philosophy. But before that I would like to ask a more general question about the relation between philosophy and biography. What can you say about this connection?
SIMON CRITCHLEY: I think that there’s an essential connection between biography and philosophy. The standard version of the history of philosophy begins with Socrates, with a life and a death. It begins with four dialogues by Plato (Apology, Euthyphro, Crito and Phaedo), on the trial and execution of Socrates. These dialogues give us a picture of Socrates’ life, his teachings and, significantly, the manner of his death at the hands of the Athenian authorities. Philosophy begins with an act of political assassination. We shouldn’t forget that. As is clear from a later text like Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, in the ancient world philosophy had an intimate connection with biography. The biography was a kind of propaedeutic to philosophy. If philosophy was a way of life, then the lives of the philosophers were essential objects of study. You can point to other examples of the way in which biography persists in relation to philosophy all the way up to Spinoza, where, on the one hand, we don’t know much about Spinoza’s life, but then, in the years after his death, three biographies appeared. He became a sort of atheist saint. And then, with someone like Nietzsche, where the life and the work get confused, where in a sense the life is the work and the work is the life.
CC: The idea that philosophy cannot be separated from one’s life. Is that an idea that would apply also to you, that your life and work have become inseparable?
SC: Hoist with my own petard, I suppose. The twentieth-century attitude, particularly in the Anglo-American world – but not just in the Anglo-American world – is that philosophy has no relationship to biography. The idea is that philosophical arguments are true by virtue of their form, or by virtue of their proof, or by their ability to be verified, while the facts about the person who wrote those things are of no importance. That’s true in Analytic philosophy, but also in Continental philosophy. Heidegger says in a lecture course about Aristotle from the 1920s that he was born, he worked and he died – and that’s all we need to know. So there’s a real hostility to biography in twentieth-century philosophy, which goes together with a sort of modernist aesthetic, an austerity that tries to separate the truth of the work from one’s life. For my part, I think biography is important as a path into philosophy, and also a sort of test of philosophy; and to whether life and work can be integrated. In my case, life and work are completely confused.
CC: Philosophizing one’s life can be done in a variety of ways, of course. On the one hand, it could be a way to protect oneself. It offers a language, and a rather seductive language at that, through which you might externalize yourself, or become detached and distanced. But, on the other hand, it could also be the case that philosophy might be extremely painful, taking you in undesired and embarrassing directions.
SC: Yeah, the idea is whether philosophy is protection and detachment, or exposure and risk. I think it’s both, although it’s probably more protective. You see, this is what a lot of philosophy teachers do. They will construct a persona, which seems to be a biographical persona – it seems to be someone they actually are – but really it’s just a protective structure. The person they are in public has no relation to who they are. So there’s a fake protection of giving oneself a public persona, which has no relation to oneself. But philosophy, or to philosophize, can also be about exposure and risk; and it should be. This exposure can happen in different ways, of course, not least through psychoanalysis.
CC: At the same time there’s this fear to be spoken of, which is perhaps why psychoanalysts like Lacan and Freud burnt manuscripts on a couple of occasions – for fear of what future biographers would do with them. This would be the flip side of psychoanalysis, and maybe also philosophy: the hesitation to symbolize or write oneself. Can you feel this fear of being written?
SC: What happens, ineluctably and regrettably, is that one becomes a brand: a persona about which various stories, anecdotes and gossip can be circulated. That can ring incredibly hollow and creates I feel, at times, a feeling of utter self-revulsion. Look, I try to be truthful. But I also don’t believe we have any privileged intuition into who we are. I don’t think introspection produces such great wonders. I think consciousness is a kind of méconnaisance, a misrecognition, as Lacan says. What I’ve learnt from psychoanalysis is that whatever insight I might have into myself is something I normally get from another person; usually and hopefully a person I love. The person you love can tell you something about yourself, from which you can then learn who you are.
CC: You have jokingly said that you’re a critical, secular, well-dressed post-Kantian – would that be your brand?
SC: No. That was said as a rhetorical ploy in a sort of critical, secular, liberal, post-Kantian context – you know, some of those gorgeous, super-clever, holier-than-thou people you find in New York. I don’t think I’m any of those. I’m not particularly critical or even particularly good at criticism. I’m not secular, that’s for sure. I have a much more tortured relationship to religion and issues of faith. Maybe I’m post-Kantian, but in a pretty strange way. And I’m not liberal, in any way at all.
CC: OK. With this in mind, could we perhaps go back in time to speak about you?
SC: If you insist. I’d rather talk about you.
CC: But that’s not going to happen. We’re going to speak about you. Now, I don’t know much about your childhood. The only thing that you’ve mentioned is that you were in a school with 11-year-old boys with beards and that you, in order to escape all the violence, had to perform exceptionally well so that you could get into another school. And this was in Liverpool?
SC: No, my family is from Liverpool, but I grew up in Letchworth Garden City, 30 miles north of London, in Hertfordshire, affectionately known as the wasteland.
CC: What kind of place was that?
SC: A wasteland, like I said. It was built as a Quaker socialist utopia in 1900. It was a project called Garden Cities – really interesting idea – with a tree outside every house, social housing and all the rest. My dad, Bill Critchley, left Liverpool in the ’50s because there was no work. He came south, and then the family came after him – basically, economic migration. The usual story. My dad was a sheet-metal worker, and my mother, Sheila, who had worked as a hairdresser in Liverpool, was home looking after my sister, who is six years older than me. As a sheet-metal worker, a rented house came with the job. He worked very hard and he did well and he was promoted. And when I was 8 years old we bought a house – which was a big deal – and we moved to the other side of town. So we moved from what was a very working-class area to a more middle-class area. And I changed schools. I went to the local school around the corner and then the local public primary school, as they’re called in England.
CC: So how did you experience school? Were you considered a good student?
SC: Yes. I did really well in school at that point. At the age of 5, 6, 7 I was really good – top of the class. But then we moved and I started a new school where I got bullied, for maybe two years. It was horrible. I was around 9, 10 at the time – it was an awful period – and I remember that I refused to go to school because I was so terrified of being beaten up. But what saved me was football. I could play football and it is still maybe the governing passion of my life. My only religious commitment is to Liverpool Football Club. My dad had been trained at the Liverpool ground and he had taught me. He stopped playing because of an ankle injury. I was pretty good for a kid from Letchworth. I was fast and I was big. And I got onto the school team and the county team. Only two kids from my school got onto the county team – this was a big deal. So suddenly, at 10 years old, I had a lot of respect. So football saved my life. I still got beaten up, and I got beaten up for the way I spoke. So I changed the way I spoke overnight and lost my Liverpool accent for this entirely bland way I speak now. I don’t know how much violence there is now, with kids.
CC: Quite a lot I imagine, especially here in London.
SC: I remember an awful lot of violence and I got beaten up regularly. But basically, to go back to your question, it was the fear of physical violence that focused my mind on school. This is true – you’d think I was making this shit up – but it’s actually true: my teacher in school, in the final year of primary school, found me and two other boys, jumping on desks and making noise – we were 10 years old. And this man, a grown-up man in his thirties, dragged us out of the classroom and hit all of us until we fell over. Seriously, he beat us to the ground. And we just took it. Eventually, weeks later, we complained to our parents, who then complained to the school, and he was dismissed the following year. I saw him driving a cab some years later.
CC: So you were working hard to escape the violence, both from teachers and violent 10-year-olds with beards?
SC: Yes. And in those days it was a very simple system. You knew exactly where you were in the hierarchy. The top ten students from the primary school got into the grammar school, and the grammar school was an academic school, which meant that there were no big men with beards and your face wasn’t pushed down the toilet everyday (who knows, psychoanalytically understood, maybe this was what I secretly desired). So through this fear of going to what was then called the secondary modern school, where 90 per cent of the population went, I realized I had to work. So I worked my way up to the first table and passed the entrance exam, what was called at the time the ‘11 plus’.
CC: So you made it. How was grammar school?
SC: We were taught by these very old men who wore gowns, and they were very ferocious. We did Latin, ancient history, sciences, languages (French and Russian) and English literature. There was an ancient history teacher who had a huge impact on me. We just did ancient history for two years and I became obsessed with it. Still am. I still have a book from those days, because I stole it from the library. It’s called Everyday Life in Babylon and Assyria. A real page-turner. I read this when I was 11 years old. It was wonderful. I read about the ancient world, Mesopotamian culture, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and then the Greeks. I was reading books – very simple ones like Kitto’s book The Greeks – on ancient history and that captivated me. When I did philosophy 11 years later I already had an attraction to Greek philosophy for that reason. What interested me about ancient history was the fact that it bore no relation to reality. It seemed to be a complete fantasy world. When history became real, I remember when we got to medieval history and then early modern history I entirely lost interest.
CC: How about your parents, were they supportive in your ambitions?
SC: My parents were great, but they had no particular interest in my education. They were encouraging at certain moments, but for the most part they were neutral. I was at a grammar school, and I think they were pleased, but I certainly wasn’t pushed. And then when I went to university, when I was 22, in October 1982, I was actually discouraged very strongly by my parents; they thought it was a completely ludicrous idea. Ours was not an educated family and I was the first one that went beyond 16. My father and mother left school when they were 14.
CC: So it was not your parents who pushed you in the direction of becoming a philosopher?
SC: Oh no. My father would have been delighted if I’d worked in a factory, and my mother would’ve been ecstatic if I’d worked in a bank, because that’s a good job – what could be better than that? The other important thing about these years was that my mother and father split up. I was 14 at the time, although it had been in the air for at least the three previous years. My father had a succession of affairs and then ended up leaving my mother for his secretary – a depressingly predictable scenario. My sister got married when I was 14, and that turned out to be the last time I saw my whole extended Liverpool family together for many years – which was a pity because we’d been really close.
CC: And how did you react to the divorce?
SC: Badly. After the divorce, I did catastrophically at school. I went from being a pretty good student to failing all my O-levels at 16, which is this qualification that you needed to get in order to go on to A-levels and then university. I failed them in a spirit of wilful self-destruction. I left formal education at the age of 16 with one ‘C’ grade in geography. I’ve always loved maps. I remember that I went to the pub after everybody else got their results. Everybody had done a lot better than me. And it then hit me that maybe I had made a huge mistake, because I deliberately failed them. I thought education was ridiculous. At that point I was into progressive German music like Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream (the first band I saw live when I was 14) – these were the only things that were really important to me. To get some money to survive over the summer, my best friend Russell and I signed on the dole. It felt great. I then went to a catering technical college, which was a further education college for people learning to become welders and hairdressers or whatever. It wasn’t exactly a great place, but it was next to the school. In fact, my old school was closed and turned into an unemployment benefit office and the catering technical college was demolished and replaced by a supermarket – that’s progress! So I was at catering technical college for two years, which was an absolute disaster. I had no interest in it at all. I was playing in all these bands, and then punk happened, in winter 1976. Year zero!
CC: Punk has obviously had a huge impact on your life – and you often return to the theme in your work. In Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, for example, you describe punk as ‘acting like an oxygen tank for those being suffocated for what passes for life in English suburbia’. Can you describe that moment when punk happened?
SC: Punk happened really fast. It was a transcendent moment. I remember hearing the first Ramones album, at a friend’s house very late at night and ‘drunk’, as it were. Suddenly it was as if every record I had heard – and all that mattered to me, as a kid, was listening to music and buying albums – had been erased. And then all these bands entered the scene, like, The Damned, The Buzzcocks and, obviously, The Sex Pistols and The Clash. But I also loved lesser-known bands like The Vibrators, The Only Ones and The Radiators from Outer Space. And also Wire. I still love Wire, especially ‘Outdoor Miner’. It was that feeling of being part of something magical: that London was the centre of the world. Crucially, a lot of punk was not by Londoners: it was by kids out in the suburbs, in the wasteland, places like Bromley, who identified with London as a magical place. This is 1976–7, and I was a big-time punk, with bondage trousers, ten-hole Dr Martens boots and a Lewis leather jacket.
CC: But we both know that you didn’t become a rock star, but a philosopher. So what happened?
SC: What happened was that I had an industrial accident – and this is really important. It was in September 1978, and I was working in a pharmaceutical factory in Hitchin, where my mum and I moved early in 1978, because we had to sell the house. I was taking out powder from a machine, in which you had metal paddles, about an inch thick, mixing the drugs. And in order to get all the powder out you had to reach into the machine with your hand and push it all down into the hole, at which point some fucking idiot turned on the machine and my hand was trapped inside it. I remember that Jilted John’s first single was on the radio. I literally had to bend the paddles to pull my hand out of the machine. All the bones were smashed and the tendons severed. I was in hospital for two weeks and then had to go through three operations. Skin grafts, reconstructive surgery. The whole banana. After two weeks, I was told by the doctor that I could keep my hand. Until that time I had no idea that I could have lost it. But the hand was so badly damaged they were expecting it to rot. Funnily enough, I’m registered disabled because of the hand. I have a 15 per cent impairment. I can’t make a fist, for example. Sort of symbolic. So, I’m 18 years old and the only things I enjoy are playing guitar and writing songs. And my left hand is my guitar hand, so I thought I could never play guitar again. I went into a massive depression, the whole of that winter, for six, seven months. And to overcome the depression I did an awful lot of drugs. But then, of course, you get even more depressed. I was going to London a lot at this time, hanging out with the wrong people, drug-dealers and the like. I still had this ambition of playing in bands, switched over to keyboards and then discovered I could still play guitar, but in a different way, I had to relearn the whole thing and then carried on with a failed musical career.
CC: This was a life-changing event?
SC: Yes, and I think it could be help...
