Simon Critchley is an English Philosopher, the Hans Jonas Professor in New School, New York. He is the founding member of the executive committee of Forum for European Philosophy, the previous program director of College International de Philosophie in Paris, the previous president of British Society for Phenomenology and the research fellow of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. He has held visiting professorship at numerous universities and authored more than twenty books which are translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, etc. In these books, he develops a strikingly independent philosophical voice of western leftist and inquired the increasingly overlapped terrain of aesthetics, politics and ethics. Some of his books such as Very Little… Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007), The Faith of the Faithless (2012) have generated lively intellectual debate in the west, notably with Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Professor Critchley also writes for The Guardian and is moderator of "The Stone", a philosophy column in The New York Times, which has attracted millions and thousands of readers.
In this interview, Professor Critchley traced the ineliminable aesthetic dimension of politics back to the time of ancient Greece, and discussed how the shifting of conceptual and normative center of some pivotal aesthetic paradigms may influence the studies of ethics and politics. Some key concepts like "poetic fiction", "sublimation", "comic paradigm" and the dialectic pair "autonomy / heteronomy" are discussed frequently, acted as the very hinge combining the interacted fields of aesthetics, literature, politics and ethics. This interview, on one hand, explains "the return of aesthetics" in contemporary western liberal studies, on the other, offers us new potentials of social intervention of western critical theories .
