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When Fiction & Philosophy Meet: A Conversation with Flannery O’Connor and Simone Weil

E. Jane Doering & Ruthann Knechel Johansen read

An innovative book, WHEN FICTION AND PHILOSOPHY MEET explores the intersection between the philosophy of Simone Weil from Paris, France, and the fiction of Flannery O’Connor from the Southern state of Georgia, USA. In an era of war, of unprecedented human displacements, and of ethnic, racial, and religious fears the ideas of these two intellectuals bear on our present condition. Both women keenly desired to perceive the realities of good and evil inherent in human existence and to bring this truth to the consciousness of their contemporaries. Embracing their belief that truth is eternal but must be transposed and translated, generation after generation, in language appropriate to each age, the authors acquaint O’Connor readers with concepts in Weil’s religious philosophy as seen in O’Connor’s stories. Doering and Johansen simultaneously illustrate how Weil’s philosophy, when embodied in fiction, reveals the lived realities of the human condition across time and space.

Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor were audacious thinkers with inquiring minds who held clear and firm religious convictions. Each applied her understandings of enduring spiritual truths to the challenges of nihilism and social oppression as seen in the spreading totalitarianism and the distressing legacy of slavery throughout human history. Both Weil and O’Connor crossed disciplinary boundaries and influenced their respective fields with innovative ideas and artistic expressions.

Taking their cues from these writers, Doering and Johansen bring these two remarkable women into a four-voiced dialogue–Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor with Doering and Johansen–by engaging each writer in the forms of her own genre and inviting readers to enter a dialogue of courage with Weil and O’Connor in the postmodern and post-Christian world.

Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2021
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Simone Weil Bibliography

Saundra Lipton read

Although Simone Weil died very young at age 34, her essays and notebooks have been the topic of a significant volume of scholarship from a wide variety of disciplines including Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Nursing, Political Science, History, Psychology, Education, and Business.  However, the last comprehensive bibliography of critical works on Simone Weil compiled by J.P. Little, dates back to 1973 with a supplement in 1979 and a small update in 1995.  The diversity and range of this ongoing scholarship make an updated comprehensive bibliography critically important for those writing on Weil and her work.

Saundra Lipton, University of Calgary, and Debra Jensen, Mount Royal University have been active collaborators (till Debra’s untimely death July 15, 2012) in the compilation of a comprehensive bibliography of scholarly works on Simone Weil.  The goal of this project is to provide a valuable service to scholars and students in many fields by facilitating access to Weilian resources across disciplinary, geographic, and linguistic divides.  Publications worldwide have been surveyed. Over 5500 works have been discovered.  This online version of the bibliography currently lists more than 5000 book, essays, journal articles, and theses.

I dedicate my continuing efforts on this project to the memory of my dear friend and colleague Debra Jensen.

University of Calgary online library of resources
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Passage & Presence (Passage et présence de Simone Weil, état des lieux)

Jean-Marc Ghitti read

Jean-Marc Ghitti has long been interested in the philosopher Simone Weil. He already dedicated a book to her in 2009, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. Since then, the scholarly Ponot has continued his research while giving lectures. It took him three more years of work to complete Simone Weil’s book Passage and Presence.
The author did not want to make a simple biography of the philosopher who left her name as a heritage to the old high school for young girls in Le Puy. Nor did he want to do a university study.

“I wanted to present the thought of Simone Weil from the places where she passed”.

Tracing the intellectual and spiritual path of the woman of letters, by traversing the places which marked her life, was not an easy task. This course covers nearly 340 pages. It begins in Puy-en-Velay, where Simone Weil, a very young professor of philosophy, arrives in September 1931 (for a school year), and ends in London in 1943. A woman’s life, who died at the age of 34 years, from tuberculosis and starvation.
Jean-Marc Ghitti divides his work into 14 chapters. Le Puy, Auxerre, Roanne, Saint-Étienne, Bourges, Spain, Italy, Marseille, Ardèche, London, but also the sea or the factory are all places through which the philosopher has passed and where she didn’t leave her mark. “Like the water that opens and closes after the passage of a boat,” illustrates the author Ponot. With her, each place is a mental moment. “
Simone Weil’s professional career, like Jean-Marc Ghitti’s book, begins in Le Puy. A place where she will put her thoughts into practice. This is the start of his engagement. She is an educated young Parisian woman who comes into contact with working-class realities that hurt her.

She meets social life at its most difficult. This experience in Le Puy was marked by scandal.

The young teacher, assigned to her first post in the high school for young girls in Place Michelet (since relocated), will meet “needy unemployed people who do public utility work to earn a few cents. Their work consists in breaking up rubble ”. Committed to union life, Simone Weil, who regularly takes the train to Saint-Étienne to educate minors, will defend the unemployed in Place Michelet. She accompanies them to the municipal council. Which will fuel a local scandal.
“The life of Simone Weil is an intellectual success based on a succession of failures,” summarizes the author of the book sold in all bookstores in France since October 17. She failed most of the things she did. Her professional career is lackluster, her involvement in the Spanish Civil War was ineffective, and neglect of her own body quickly led to the loss of her life. “
But her thought made her a great 20th-century philosophical figure.

KIME; 1st edition (September 17, 2021)

Jean-Marc Ghitti is an associate professor and doctor of philosophy. He has authored various philosophical and literary works. In 2007, in the city where he taught, he created an association, Présence Philosophique au Puy, to bring the spirit of Simone Weil to life.
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Venice Saved

Simone Weil, ed. & trans by Silvia Panizza & Philip Wilson read

Towards the end of her life, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43) was working on a tragedy, Venice Saved. Appearing here in English for the first time, this play explores the realisation of Weil’s own thoughts on tragedy. A figure of affliction, a central theme in Weil’s religious metaphysics, the central character offers a unique insight into Weil’s broader philosophical interest in truth and justice, and provides a fresh perspective on the wider conception of tragedy itself.

The play depicts the plot by a group of Spanish mercenaries to sack Venice in 1618 and how it fails when one conspirator, Jaffier, betrays them to the Venetian authorities, because he feels compassion for the city’s beauty.

The edition includes notes on the play by the translators as well as introductory material on: the life of Weil; the genesis and purport of the play; Weil and the tragic; the issues raised by translating Venice Saved. With additional suggestions for further reading, the volume opens up an area of interest and research: the literary Weil.

New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Reviewed

Ronald Collins, “The Play’s the Thing: On Simone Weil’s Venice Saved,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Aug. 28, 2019
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Sacrifice Between West and East: René Girard, Simone Weil and Mahatma Gandhi on Violence and Non-Violence

Wolfgang Palaver read

Wolfgang Palaver In this chapter, Wolfgang Palaver looks at developments in Rene Girard’s later work, in particular, at Girard’s assessment that he had earlier unfairly “scapegoated” sacrifice in an effort to rid humanity of violence. In recognition of the need to address — not erase — the violence that is with us, Girard developed his thinking in at least two ways. The first is his growing interest in how an “ontology of peace,” which Girard held undergirds all faith traditions, is expressed in non-Christian faiths. Second is his insight that Jesus’s death on the cross tells us not only about the evils of sacrifice-as-murder but also about the productive possibilities of sacrifice-of-self, giving for the sake of others. To explore what such donative sacrifice consists in, Palaver investigates the theories of oppression, resistance, and sacrifice in the works of Simone Weil and Mahatma Gandhi.

in in Marcia Pally, ed., Mimesis and Sacrifice Applying Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines, Bloomsbury (2019), pp. 37-50
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The Red Virgin: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Simone Weil

Clark McCann read

The Red Virgin, by Clark McCann, reimagines the life of the French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943) through the character of Sabine Arnaud. Weil acquired the pejorative nickname, “red virgin,” at the Sorbonne because of her radical politics, mannish clothes, and asexual nature. During her short life, Weil frustrated all those who might claim her for their own. She was a Christian who refused baptism, a Jew who denied her heritage, a Marxist who denounced communism, and a towering intellect who condemned the intelligentsia for their social privilege and moral cowardice. Perhaps most telling, she was a prophet of love who shrank from the touch of man or woman. The Red Virgin brings the mind and spirit of this fascinating woman to life in a philosophical novel with a plot worthy of a thriller.

The story opens in Los Angeles in 1976. Craig Martin, a jaded sitcom writer, discovers clues among his mother’s effects that a long-dead French philosopher, Sabine Arnaud, might be his birth mother. Arnaud, a refugee from Occupied France, had been a neighbor of his mother in New York in 1942, the year of his birth. Arnaud then left for London, where she hoped to join de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, only to fall ill and die of tuberculosis before realizing her dream of fighting the Nazis.  Martin sets off for Europe in search of Arnaud’s past and stumbles on a wartime secret that puts his life in danger. Arnaud’s death may have been faked by British Intelligence before sending her on a mission to Occupied France. As the mystery shrouding Arnaud’s life and death unfolds, Martin follows her trail, a step ahead of those who would silence them both. Alternating between the 1970s and World War II Europe, we follow Martin and Arnaud on their separate journeys, across three continents, until Martin finds the answers he seeks in the remote mountains of Ethiopia.

Issaquah, WA: Solesmes Press, 2019
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Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

Simone Weil

Laurie Gagne, ed., Plough Publishing House