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The Politics of Rootedness: On Simone Weil and George Orwell

Oriol Quintana read

Simone Weil and George Orwell both reflected—at a time when liberalism and Christianity were being challenged—on how to provide rootedness to societies and how to provide a moral anchoring and collective inspiration. The chapter considers the extent to which religion plays an important role in these authors’ politics of rootedness. A comparison between them suggests that rather than worrying first about whether or not we need a religious revival, we should worry about whether individuals have the opportunity to enter into contact with beauty. For both Weil and Orwell, a society is well-rooted when there is a continuity between natural beauty and social life. As such, a politics of rootedness entails, in their view, a genuine search for the recognition of all members of a collectivity and, above all, the search for a way of learning again how to find nourishment in the beauty of the world.

in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103-123.
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God Comes to Her: A Kantian Reflection on Evil and Religious Experience in St. Teresa of Ávila and Simone Weil

Elvira Basevich read

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1-22
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The Paradox of Attention

Simone Kotva read

Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred.

In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva’s new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential.

Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation.

Essay in Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 131-172.
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“Simone Weil: The Mask, The Person”

David Tracy

in David Tracy, Filaments: Theological Profiles, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
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“On Giorgio Agamben’s Theoretical Debt to Simone Weil: Destituent Potential and Decreation”

Michael Murphy

in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 83-102
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“Ideology as Idolatry”

Alexandra Féret

in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 143-160
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“‘To Make Known this Method’: Simone Weil and the Business of Institutional Education”

Christopher A. P. Nelson

in Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca & Stone, Lucian, eds., The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, New York: Continuum, pp. 76-90
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“The Dance of Perception: The Rôle of the Imagination in Simone Weil’s Early Epistemology”

Warren Heiti

in Keith Moser & Ananta Ch. Sukla, eds., Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory, Brill, pp. 304-331
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“Introduction: Weil, Politics & Ideology”

Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle

in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-24