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The Revenge of Maurras

Nathan Pinkoski read

Review of: L’avenir de l’intelligence et autres textes, by Charles Maurras, edited by Martin Motte // 1,280 pages, €32,00

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 Every year, France’s Ministry of Culture publishes an official volume to commemorate major anniversaries in French history, covering past events as well as the lives of prominent personalities. Assembled by a team of historians and approved by the Ministry, the list mixes victories and failures, the honored and the notorious—judging events and personalities strictly on the basis of their historical significance. In 2018, the judges placed Charles Maurras on the list, noting the 150th anniversary of his birth. Protests ensued. The judges insisted that commemoration is not the same as celebration, to no avail. Bowing to pressure, the Minister of Culture recalled and re-edited the volume. Maurras’s name was effaced from the official history.

The same year saw the release of a new anthology of Maurras, the first edition of his works to be arranged and published since 2002. It, too, caused a scandal. Reviewers deplored “the return of a fascist icon.”

Publishing an anthology of ­Maurras is an offense against the postwar consensus and the “official history” of the twentieth century. Yet the case for studying Maurras is hard to deny. He was historically significant. As a political journalist, essayist, and poet, writing for more than six decades, he reached a wide audience and maintained enormous influence. Charles Péguy, Marcel Proust, and André Malraux all praised his talent. Those who acknowledged their intellectual debt to Maurras include philosophers Louis Althusser, Pierre Boutang, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Maritain, and Gustave Thibon, and novelists Georges Bernanos, Michel Déon, Jacques Laurent, and Roger Nimier. French president Georges Pompidou, the pragmatic conservative of the 1970s, praised Maurras as a prophet of the modern world. T. S. Eliot, who read Maurras for years, said that Maurras had helped him toward Christianity. Maurras was, for Eliot, “a sort of Virgil who led us to the gates of the temple.”

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“The Revenge of Maurras,” First Things (Nov. 2019)
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Theatre as Creative Failure: Simone Weil’s Venise sauvée Revisited

Thomas Sojer read

Abstract: Simone Weil’s dramatic criticism and dramatic writing offer a way of reconceptualizing what it means to engage critically under fascist censorship. This essay explores her closet drama Venise sauvée as an example of her embrace of writing political resistance in a time when classical theatre criticism was absent and artistic resistance had been made futile. Simone Weil called for an awakening in the audience to acknowledge their responsibility of how they let theatre shape their way of thinking about war. I demonstrate that Weilian theatre theory does not only consider the stage an object to be analyzed, but also the very subject through whose lenses one can undertake a critical reshaping of ways to interpret the world. In this dramatic view on WW II Weil exhibits the artistic voices of resistance in occupied France as caught in its own echo chambers and thus no longer perceptible in society. The essay reads her unfinished historical tragedy Venise sauvée and its central motif of the silenced voice of resistance as an implicit warning to the contemporary théâtre resistant to become the agent of its own irrelevance. I propose that beyond this warning there lies a theory of deconstructing propaganda theatre by unleashing the creative power of theatre’s failure, namely via a distortion of the socially synchronized inner and outer stage of the audience.

Platform, Vol. 13, No. 1, On Criticism, Autumn 2019, pp. 17-30
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Simone Weil and theatre: from attention to the descending way

Giuliano Campo read

Theatre artists and philosophers all over the centuries have often pointed out the existence of two levels within every phenomenon; we call this thought “Dualism”. During the last centuries, many have focused on a specific, although the traditional, example of dualism, which envisions a superior, transcendent reality – that is not connected to ours -. The performer can create such a connection, through her work on “verticality”, touching the superior invisible realm, which must then descend back to our everyday dimension. This article analyses one of the main tools used in order to set up a connection between these two dimensions, that is attention, according to in particular to one of the main thinkers of the twentieth century: Simone Weil. In this regard, the author explores the last pedagogical work of French actor and theatre pedagogue Louis Jouvet and the last period of research by Jerzy Grotowski and his pupils, both focused on that “attention” and “descending way”, which works on the same line of what is better known as “Verticality.” In the second part, Campo comments on Weil’s selected passages.

Stanislavski Studies: Practice, Legacy, and Contemporary Theater, vol. 7, no. 2 (2019), pp. 177-200.
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“Simone Weil on having an inner life”

Eric Springsted listen

We readily recognize the concept of an inner life as a moral category. We struggle to say what an inner life is, though. This essay examines and rejects naturalistic attempts to either dismiss the idea of an inner life or make it a matter of brain states, a sort of efficient causality to behaviour. Relying on Simone Weil’s distinction between “the language of the market place and the language of the nuptial chamber,” it distinguishes, as she did, between levels of value. The inner life is a life of dealing with values that demand some kind of personal and intimate response.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 142-157.
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Attention: Thomas A. Clark and Simone Weil

Simone Kotva read

This essay studies the connection between attention and redemption in the poetry of Thomas A. Clark. It discusses the possibility of using Simone Weil’s religious philosophy to interpret Clark’s understanding of attention as ‘waiting’. It argues that while there are affinities between Clark and Weil, Clark’s poetic practice also reveals a resistance to the ascetic extremes which attention assumes in Weil’s philosophy. To think through the difference between attention as method and style, the essay then draws on the failures of Descartes’ Meditations in order to argue that only a practical, that is to say, stylistic, engagement with attention will allow for the radical attention that Weil sought but could not achieve.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–16, and American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3.
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Turning the gaze to the self and away from the self – Foucault and Weil on the matter of education as attention formation

Johannes Rytzler read

Ethics and Education, vol. 14, no. 3