I Want to Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett

by Simon Critchley

“There is a common fallacy that is oddly and sadly even more widespread amongst non-philosophers than philosophers, that art is somehow explained by philosophy. It is not.”

The philosopher Simon Critchley has long been drawn to the distinctive questions raised by tragedy. In this major new work, conceived as a sequel to his Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019), he describes the power of tragic drama as deriving from its depictions of 'stuckness': of the inescapable situation of being oneself. In readings of Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, and Samuel Beckett, Critchley offers an exceptionally perceptive account of how tragedy dramatises this irreducibly absurd condition.

I Want to Die, I Hate My Life is at once a searching philosophical engagement with tragedy and a bracing argument against the widespread tendency to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of philosophical ideas. Critchley’s exposition of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of tragic drama—of tragedy’s resistance to the kind of rational explanations that philosophers have sought to impose upon it—doesn’t just enhance our understanding of literature; it also points towards a wiser, more subtle, and more dynamic way of doing philosophy.

160 pages, Paperback

Published May 6, 2025

About the author

Simon Critchley (born 27 February 1960 in Hertfordshire) is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political. These two axes may be said largely to inform his published work: religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics [...]

Reviews

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

being the only review on this book makes me nervous. i'm hiding my review on storygraph

[sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this. I don’t have the background to fully appreciate some of the arguments that he makes, but I think the essays are really interesting and engaging even without a strong philosophy or theater background. It is so fun to chew on what makes tragedy compelling, and there are a lot of concepts here that I have been turning over and over in my head since finishing and recognizing in other works that I find compelling. Enjoyed a lot.

[Roxane Dumontheil · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastic collection of essays on theatre and playwrights. loved the one on Phaedra which sparked a re-reading, the one on Ibsen was interesting for its take on his hysterical women characters, the Shakespeare one I found lack depth, and of course I love the Beckett one because I love Beckett and now crave another re-reading.

[Hetian bias · Rating 5 out of 5]

obsessed