Fiona Shaw + Simon Critchley

“Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it… it’s just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.” – Henrik Ibsen
Millions of young cinemagoers know her only as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, yet Fiona Shaw is regarded as one of the finest classical actresses of her generation.Here she joins philosopher Simon Critchley to talk about nothing: from the nothingess in Beckett, the emptiness in Eliot, to the hollowness at the heart of Henrik Ibsen’s later works. Shaw is appearing in John Gabriel Borkman at BAM in January 2011. Critchley latest book is called How to Stop Living and Start Worrying.
Simon Critchley is Chair and Professor Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His works include the acclaimed treatment on deconstruction, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (1999); an interpretation of nihilism Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997) and the bestselling The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008). He runs a column in The New York Times called ‘The Stone’. A collection of interviews with Critchley and Carl Cederström How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (2010) appears in a paperback edition this November. He is equally adept at discussing the music of David Bowie and the soccer star Zidane, as he is Heidegger’s Being and Time.