Book Review: Simone Weil’s anti-fascist blueprint
Mac Loftin, Simone Weil’s anti-fascist blueprint, The Christian Century (March 2025)
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Attention, Availability, and the Reading of Books
Attentive Pedagogy: Essays on Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
When Gravity Devalues Grace: Further Reflections on Thibon’s Weil Book
Inside Issue 11: New and Forthcoming
Weil’s Vision for a Post-War France . . . and the Very Different France that Took Form
The Radical Weil and the Rightist Thibon: A First Set of Thoughts on “Gravity and Grace”
Eric Voegelin’s and Simone Weil’s return to Ancient Greece
Summary: Two enigmatic figures of 20th-century political theory, Eric Voegelin and Simone Weil, stand out with idiosyncratic receptions of ancient Greek texts. Both thinkers diagnosed that, as political agents in late modernity, we have unlearned to read world-making ancient texts and their narratives in their cosmic dimension and thus lost what has rooted European culture and history. Against this backdrop, Voegelin and Weil share ‘antidotal’ practises of combining historically and generically distinct material. These practices aim at fathoming a primordial experience at work in European narratives. With this comparative analysis of Voegelin’s and Weil’s symbolic readings (exemplified in this paper by passages from the Iliad, the History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Symposium), Thomas Sojer presents some considerations how their combinatory imagination of ancient material could supply late modern political agents with a pathos, a meaningful self-world relationship that was thought to have gone missing.
- Thomas Sojer, “Eric Voegelin’s and Simone Weil’s return to Ancient Greece,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol 61, no. 1 (May 17, 2022), pp. 87-96.
Questioning Greece with Heidegger and Simone Weil
Abstract: “In this book a long-time student of phenomenology and of Greek art and philosophy stages a “loving quarrel” between two daring thinkers who loved Greece but had diametrically opposed interpretations of its legacy. Maria Villela-Petit brings out unsuspected strengths in Simone Weil’s readings of Homer, Plato, and Greek Tragedy and unsuspected weaknesses in Heidegger’s historical construction and the tradition of German philhellenism which shaped it.”
- Maria Villela-Petit, Questioning Greece with Heidegger and Simone Weil (Independently published, Joseph S. O’Leary, trans.)
The Objectification of the Worker: Simone Weil and her Influence on Contemporary Thought
Abstract: “The French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943) elaborated a thought on work, on its organization and its conditions. Having experienced the mechanization of companies, she was able to describe the process of the objectification of the worker. His reflection on the instrumentalization of the worker and that of work always nourishes great contemporary thinkers, such as Alain. This reflection is all the more current at the dawn of new realities, such as digitalization and the Internet revolution, which, supposed to liberate man, are factors of an even deeper objectification of the employee.
This article, therefore, aims to unveil the mechanisms of objectification as Simone Weil described them and to propose some ways to transcend them, faced with the risk of their persistence in an upset work environment.”
Excerpt: :The thirties in France were marked by the great economic depression and political instability: small entrepreneurs suffered, unemployment increased and workers’ strikes multiplied. Weil does not remain indifferent to the social and political events of her time. As a young teacher in the early thirties, she is already working as a trade unionist. She then apprehends the phenomenon of the alienation of the worker through the works of Karl Marx, but it is their objectification that she will confront for several months (from December 1934 to August 1935) while working in the Renault and Alsthom factories. From this period she leaves us her Factory Diary which highlights her own internal conflicts but which also describes the daily life of the workers of the 1930s, daily life often limited to the ‘working time’ factor. In it, she describes their situation, their uprooting and their alienation. . . .”
- Nelli Sołonko, “The Objectification of the Worker: Simone Weil and her Influence on Contemporary Thought,” French Studies Bulletin, vol. 44, no. 166 (Summer 2023), pp. 12–16 {L’Objectification du Travailleur: Simone Weil et son Influence Sur la Pensée Contemporaine} [Yandex Translate]
