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Simone Weil: Marxism Outside Itself

Thomas Dommange read

S. Weil’s relationship to Marxism is paradoxical because it unveils a loyalty to Marx in spite of ruptures and renunciations of the Marxist theory. S. Weil’s ties to Marxism seem discontinuous because after having adopted certain revolutionary ideas during her first years of political activism she criticizes Marx in the 30’s and ends up seemingly abandoning him in the last part of her life. This path, however, far from revealing the slow and inexorable disappearance of Marx’s concepts, rather, demonstrates the persistence and metamorphoses in S. Weil’s philosophy. We suggest then, that a criticism of the revolution followed by a kind of Christianity developed in the wake of a year spent in the factory, constitute S. Weil’s own special manner of being Marxist, even though Marxism seems to have become useless to her.

Les Etudes Philosophiques, vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 207-222
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Of Colonialism and Corpses: Simone Weil on Force

Helen M. Kinsella read

Excerpt

“. . . . In the scholarship on Simone Weil, her emphasis on colonialism is still not yet fully integrated into analyses of the use of force nor, more generally, as another source of her reflections on the concepts which adumbrate her work.6 Processes that she identified as constitutive of colonialism’s brutality – uprooting, loss of the past, degradation of labor, and the pursuit of unlimited profit and power – inform her thought. As Dietz points out, the hallmarks of Weil’s concerns are “the meaning of individual freedom in the modern collectivity, the nature of community in the nation-state, and the political and social possibilities for an end to the affliction and oppression of the human condition,” each of which directly implicates colonialism and empire. In this chapter, I propose to explore the relationship of colonization to her concept of force and her exposition of rights – to draw out the ways in which her argument that force turns “man into a thing” is born out of her earlier analysis of how in colonial wars “we, first of all, reduce whole populations to slavery, and then we use them as cannon fodder.”

I argue that this accomplishes three things. First, Weil provides an analysis of modernity and the rise of totalitarianism that specifically centers colonialism as fundamental to each and, consequently, to any analysis of international politics. Second, she develops her theories through her own political engagement and activism in the context of her time, negotiating and unsettling the governing intellectual, social, and political expectations – as articulated through gender, certainly, but also no less so through the complex intersections of class and religion. Accordingly, her politics and her scholarship continue to challenge a disciplinary post-1945 positioning of colonialism as peripheral to the development of international thought, and further confirm the significance of “historical women” in the field. Third, Weil’s own reckoning with the tumultuous politics of her time can animate contemporary analyses of force as understood and enacted in complex and critical ways.”

** Essay in Patricia Owens & Katharina Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: A New History, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2021), pp. 72-92.

Helen M. Kinsella is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
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From Innate Morality Towards a New Political Ethos: Simone Weil with Carol Gilligan and Judith Butler

Aviad Heifetz read

In 1943, Simone Weil proposed to supersede the declaration of human rights with a declaration of obligations towards every human being’s balancing pairs of body and soul’s needs, for engaging and inspiring more effectively against autocratic and populist currents in times of crisis. We claim that Weil’s proposal, which remains pertinent today, may have been sidestepped because her notion of needs lacked a fundamental dimension of relationality, prominent in the ‘philosophical anthropology’ underlying the (different) visions for a new political ethos of both Judith Butler and Carol Gilligan. From the radical starting point of innate morality common to all three thinkers, we, therefore, indicate how an enriched notion of interlaced needs, encompassing both balance and relationality, may restore the viability of a declaration of human obligations as a robust source of inspiration. In this combination of balance and relationality, Butler’s notion of aggressive nonviolence is key.

Article in  Ethics, Politics & Society. A Journal in Moral and Political Philosophy, no. 4 (2021), pp. 175-188.
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“The Love of God and Man’s Suffering: Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos”

William S. Bush

in Dunaway, John M. & Springsted, Eric. O., The Beauty that Saves: Essays on Aesthetics and Language in Simone Weil, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, pp. 185-196
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Love between Two Poems: The Imagination, Love and Literature in Simone Weil

Lieven De Maeyer

Mysticism and/as Love Theory (2021), pp. 167-176
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Against Religious Fellow-Traveling

Taylor Ross read

This essay argues that Simone Weil’s writings suggest a phenomenological method of particular relevance to investigating ethical questions. It begins by presenting evidence that although Weil does not mention phenomenology explicitly, she thinks about ethics in a phenomenological manner. Subsequent sections outline a “phenomenological ethics” derived from Weil’s notion of attention and her hermeneutics of ‘reading’ the world. Since attention sets aside the self and its personal world, this allows for an ethics of self-abdication (decreation) relatively free of influence by the forces of domination. David Rousset’s term “concentrationary universe” is introduced to describe the claim, argued by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and others, that present-day societies show evidence of an increasing reliance on ways of thinking derived from the Nazi concentration camps. Examples are given of applications of Weil’s phenomenological method to the problem of how to recognize signs of potential domination in a concentrationary universe.

Macrina Magazine, no. 6, (December 5, 2020)
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The Work of Simone Weil: An Educational Mission

Daniela De Leo read

 The paper investigates the question if Simone Weil’s thought is unitary or fragmentary, if one can speak of a “system” concerning her theoretical approach, and if her works are still current. The paper suggests a re-reading of Weil’s reflections to find in them an educative aim. 

 “A pilgrim of thought 

When one approaches the greatness of Weilian philosophy, one is inevitably taken by very conflicting emotions: this woman of genius inspires strong passions. 

Simone Weil, an ascetic, uncontrollable, overpowering woman, literally fed herself either on the words of peasants and workers or on reading her classic works, forgetting to eat. 

She refused all obliging solutions in order to be always ready to confront herself with the innovation and variety of situations, without examining them through the reassuring methods of memberships. 

 A double misrepresentation of the figure of Simone Weil emerges from the critics’ interpretations: the first one, based on hagiographic criteria, makes

her a separate, singular case, by distinguishing the years of her political commitment from the last years, which are characterized by a mystical and religious experience, and the second one, which attempts to equate her, in all ways, with the other intellectuals of her time. 

From this interpretative hodgepodge, therefore, the image of Simone Weil emerges as that of a sensitive, lucid, and committed intellectual who moves from civil rejection to contemplative acceptance of the fracture between manual and intellectual work, from a complaint of the factory regime to the dream of a domestic industry, and from the condemnation of the Soviet-style State to the proposal for a Constitutional Act that prohibits parties. . . . “

 This paper is based on the report presented in English at the XVII Congreso Internacional del Grupo.  

 Daniela De Leo: Professore Aggregato di Filosofia Teoretica – Università del Salento.  
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Creating Ethical Societies in a Concentrationary Universe: Simone Weil’s Phenomenological Ethics of Attention

Robert Reed read

Journal of Dharma, vol. 45, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 2020) pp. 529-544.