Overview Critchley is a prolific author and has written over twenty monographs, including works on
philosophers’ deaths,
Hamlet,
Greek tragedy, suicide, association football, and
David Bowie. He has also written numerous essays and articles on various thinkers and writers (such as
Hegel,
Heidegger,
Jean Genet,
Derrida,
Levinas,
Richard Rorty,
Laclau,
Lacan,
Jean-Luc Nancy, and
Blanchot) and on topics ranging from the dimensions of
Plato's academy and the
mysteries of Eleusis to
Philip K. Dick,
Mormonism, money, and the joy and pain of
Liverpool Football Club fans. Many of these pieces appear in three essay collections:
Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, & Contemporary French Thought (1999);
Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts (2021); and
I Want to Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett (2025). Critchley's extensive work on Martin Heidegger has appeared in many formats: as a series of 8 articles written in 2009 for
The Guardian; as a commentary, ''On Heidegger's
"
Being and Time"'' (2008), which was published along with
Reiner Schürmann’s lectures on Heidegger; and as an extended series of podcasts, "Apply-Degger," which are intended to be a long-form, deep dive into Heidegger's magnum opus,
Being and Time. Critchley has also sustained a long engagement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. He is the co-editor (with
Robert Bernasconi) of
The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, and his
The Problem with Levinas, an edited collection of four lectures, appeared in 2015. His work and writing also appears in various other formats and genres: a volume on
Continental Philosophy (2001) for
Oxford University Press’ “
Very Short Introductions” series; a series of interviews with Carl Cederström,
How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (2010), based on a Swedish TV series; an edited collection of various interviews and conversations (spanning a decade) with Critchley himself, published as
Impossible Objects (2012); a novella,
Memory Theater (2014); a book-length philosophical essay titled
Notes on Suicide (2015); and a book of
fragments,
ABC of Impossible Objects (2015).
Late 1990s Critchley’s first monograph,
The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992)—now in its third edition—argues against the received understanding of
Derrida as either a metaphysician with his own ‘infrastructure’ or as a value-free nihilist who engages in endless relativization. Instead, Critchley argues that central to Derrida's thinking is a conception of ethical experience that is informed by his engagement with Levinas. Critchley also lays out “the ethical and political underpinnings of the deconstructive project itself.” Critchley develops his thesis through “individual readings” of Blanchot, Levinas,
Cavell,
German Romanticism,
Adorno, Derrida,
Beckett, and
Wallace Stevens.
2000s On Humour (2002) explores the role that
humour,
jokes,
laughter, and
smiling play in human life, all of which arise from the “brute,
phenomenological fact” that we are “embodied actors”—
physiognomy, Critchley thinks, is intimately bound up with what we find humorous and with laughter. In
Things Merely Are
: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005), Critchley argues that Stevens is the “philosophically most interesting poet to have written in English in the twentieth century” and that his poetry offers illuminating
insights into how we can recast the relationship between mind, language, and material things. The book also includes an extended engagement with the cinema of
Terrence Malick. Critchley's
Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2007) challenges the ancient notion that philosophy begins in wonder, and argues that philosophy begins in disappointment. The book addresses the topic of political disappointment, and argues for an ethically informed
neo-anarchism. Perhaps Critchley's most famous work,
The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) takes its cue from
Cicero’s remark that “to philosophize is to learn how to die”—a claim that is “axiomatic for most ancient philosophy” (and that can be found as far back as
Socrates and down to
Montaigne). Critchley “is as interested in what philosophers have thought about death as in how they died.” He catalogues and discusses the
deaths (and lives) and last words of around 190 philosophers, from the
pre-Socratic age right down to the 21st century.
2010s–present In
The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (2012), Critchley aims to use his account of “dividualism” from his 2007 book,
Infinitely Demanding, as a jumping-off point to rethink faith as a political concept, without dismissing religion (as atheists do) or letting it fall into fundamentalist hands. The book takes its title from a remark by
Oscar Wilde, and Critchley argues that it is in our failure to meet “the infinite ethical demands” that religion makes on us that a space is created for a
paradoxically faithless faith. Co-authored with Jamieson Webster,
Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013) approaches Shakespeare’s
Hamlet “through a double philosophical and
psychoanalytic lens,” drawing on the play's various readings (by, for example,
Carl Schmitt,
Walter Benjamin,
Hegel,
Freud,
Lacan, and
Nietzsche). Critchley has said that since the mid- to late 2010s, he has been explicitly trying to write on his “elemental passions,” and that Bowie and football (or soccer) figure at the top of that list. In his well-received, “elegant” 2014 book on
David Bowie (which was expanded and re-published in 2016), he aimed, in his own words, “to try and find concepts that do justice to Bowie’s art in ways that are neither music journalism, dime store psychology, biography or crappy social history. . . . [to find] a language that gives the huge importance of pop culture its due, that describes and dignifies it in the right way.” In 2017, Critchley published
What We Think When We Think About Football. In it, he explores the “poetics of football”—“an account of the game as a phenomenological experience, an inquiry into the fraught ecstasies of fandom, a delving into the contraction and expansion of time from first to last whistle, an exploration of the presence of history that lingers inside of momentous moments.” Critchley's
Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (2019) was described by
Simon Goldhill as “self-consciously obsessed with how and why philosophers have wanted to regulate tragedy” and that rejects “the tragic” as a subject or as an “abstract quality,” and emphasizes the experiential, phenomenological aspects of the plays. His most recent monograph,
On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy, is a survey and exploration of historical mystics (such as
Julian of Norwich and
Meister Eckhart) through the works of writers such as
Annie Dillard and
T.S. Eliot, and was published in 2024.
Public Philosophy Critchley is explicit in his defense of the relevance of philosophy in the public realm and outside academia. Between 2010 and 2021, Critchley moderated
The Stone in
The New York Times. Contributors have included thinkers such as
Linda Martín Alcoff,
Seyla Benhabib,
Gary Gutting,
Philip Kitcher, Chris Lebron,
Todd May,
Jason Stanley, and
Peter Singer. The forum has generated three collections of essays, co-edited by Critchley and Peter Catapano, and published by W.W. Norton & Co.:
The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments (2015),
The Stone Reader: Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments (2017), and
Question Everything: A Stone Reader (2022). ==Other Interests==