How to Stop Living and Start Worrying: Conversations with Carl Cederstrom: Conversations with Carl Cederström [Paperback]

This book is an extended interview, in which the philosopher Simon Critchley presents his views on various issues, such as love, death and humour. The Q&A approach makes it quite accessible, but ultimately I found it meandering and self-referential. Critchley likes soundbites - "Death is a non-issue", "humour is a consequence of original sin" - but this is a book that bristles with interesting ideas rather than mounting a sustained argument, and in the end it feels slight even if interesting.

This book has a catchy title which suggests its going to be both amusing and in some way critical of the self-help genre it parodies in the title (it is an inversion of the self-help classic How To Stop Worrying And Start Living (Personal development)), the blurb on the back of the book/product details suggests so also and the introduction expands on this too, promising that the book deals with the topic of the finitude of human life and pressing issues which should prompt a pause for thought.

However, that was not what I found this book to really contain. I had expected something similar to either The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy (pop philosophy) or Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian (politics), the later of which adopts the same question and answer dialogue format and structure. Instead there is a mainly biographical and personal dialogue, its is really conversational in tone and style, without the sort of depth or detail that you could expect, this was certainly what I found.

The content is curiously akin to online discussions, which can be entertaining and make for easy reading, there is the same sort of casual self-disclosure which you can encouner in discussions or blogs. I found it consequently readable but suspect that if you where a real fan of Simon Critchley and his writing (which I am unacquainted with) you could find this more interesting or engaging a read. I would find this book difficult to categorise, it isnt exactly a humour section offering but neither is it a philosophy or pop philosophy read either.

The book has a clear contents, bibliogrpahy and index, it is therefore accessible if you want to read a particular topic and can find a keyword, the chapters permeate one another but do divide along the lines of each chapter heading, ie life, love, death, authenticity. Life is mainly autobiographical and it was interesting to read about Critchley's ascendency to his present position as accomplished academic, it was also interesting to read his opinions on the topics, although I did feel that it was all tip of the iceberg material and I really would have appreciated more detail on certain points and hoped further clarification would result from the questions but it did not.

So I can say that Critchley recognises finitude of mortality, has an interest in theology, perhaps, mystical anarchism, has an interest in psycho-analysis but appears to be only acquainted with Freud and Lacan (very possibly Freud via Lacan), continential philosophy is his area of expertise, by which is meant Derrida, Foucault, Levine and some authors I've never heard of, doesnt like self-help books and considers love to involve masochistic inclinations or sacrifices. That is a synopsis with comparable detail or depth to the book's content.

It is a passable read, however, I could not say that I liked it or would really recommend it to a general reader. Perhaps if you are a fan of Critchley you may really enjoy this or if you have a particular interest or like for this sort of dialogue/first person narrative style of writing you may enjoy it more.

This short book consists of transcripts of conversations between Carl Cederstrom and philosopher Simon Critchley. The topics covered - or to be more accurate, skimmed over - include philosophy, death, love and humour. The opening section is a discussion of Critchley's early life and how he became interested in philosophy, and in the final section the two principals are joined by novelist Tom McCarthy to discuss authenticity.

The intended audience for this book is unclear. The lack of background explanation means that anybody who has not read at least some of Critchley's other works will struggle with a lot of the content, whilst those already familiar with his thinking are unlikely to gain much from the sketchy discussions here. There are glimpses of interesting ideas but these are rarely developed.

On reflection, David Shields's Camus reference on the back cover together with the tiresome pranksterism of the final chapter did make me wonder if the book is some sort of elaborate in-joke?