What I'm Reading: Simon Critchley, "Infinitely Demanding"

Critchley’s goal in this book is to put forward an entirely new view of meta-ethics and then apply it to both theology and politics. Easy Peasy! The meta-ethics bits are actually quite good - he has interesting ideas about how the self comes to form around ethical demands that maybe can’t even be met. He also takes an interesting stance on where moral reasons come from. I do think those sections are a bit incomplete and go too far too fast though.

Unfortunately the rest of the book goes a bit off the rails. The theological bits are illuminating to an extent but left me with more questions and get quite woolly towards the end of the chapter. Critchley says that we need to apply his new meta-ethical perspective to politics, which is a fair enough line of inquiry, but he dismisses oceans of political philosophy - notably Lenin, and then later on anarchist thinking - a bit quickly for my liking. There is one excellent section where Critchley makes a stellar theoretical defence of what is these days called ‘identity politics,’ though when this book came out in 2012 it didn’t have an official name yet; he admits this bit is largely drawn from earlier work by Courtney Jung. 

The rest left me scratching my head: Critchley has a Žižekian tendency to cite not actual political activists, but other writers writing about political activists (including Žižek). He also can’t resist namedropping: large sections of the book are impenetrable if you don’t know Kant, Marx, Freud, Hegel, Levinas, Badiou, and a host of other tricky thinkers. The recommendations his final section make have already been taken up by activists who (I admit I presume) never read this book. 

Contrast this with something like Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism, which presents a solidly grounded ethical and political program whilst remaining accessible and rooted in practically centring those who have skin in the game in concrete activist projects. It was during the final section of this book that I began to ask myself who is Infinitely Demanding for? Critchley writes that he hopes it will be the glue that can bind disparate cells of radical politics together, but then why is it largely impenetrable to all but the most highly educated of readers, and so abstracted away from examples of real struggles? That’s not to say political activists are uneducated by any stretch; just that if you make a nine-mile reading list the barrier of entry to your political movement you might miss out on a few recruits. Contrast that with a writer like Lenin, whose Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism is pretty accessible despite its complexity. Or even contrast it to fascist writers today, for whom the barrier of entry is just, “Hey - ever noticed things are a bit shit?” Why write it this way?

Because this book is for people who think about politics for a living, not people who think about politics because it’s killing them. This is a book by and for the privileged Leftist commentariat; that’s why it can end by saying that we need to start engaging ethically with politics, because to the author that’s a choice rather than something forced upon him already. That’s why the praise on the back is mainly (though not exclusively) from academics, not survivors of the very worst of contemporary politics. It’s preaching to the choir; selling Marxism at a farmers’ market so we can all go home feeling clever and a bit edgy. I fully admit this puts me smack dab in the target audience, but I was still a bit disappointed when I struggled through to the end that so many bits were kept obscure and so many questions left unanswered, chief among which was, “Why was this made?” Like LOST.

I’m harping on the negatives: there are bits of it, especially early on, that really are quite good and I will be turning parts into upcoming episodes. When Critchley is summarising other famous philosophers he does a fine enough job: I understand Plato better having read this book, which is a positive. If you’d like to check it out for yourself you can get it here.