Simone Weil’s Finished Platonism
Les Etudes Philosophiques, vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 169-182.
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The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one’s voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous.
“To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.
in Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2007, p. 108-143. Previously published: “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29 (Winter 2003), pp. 216-252
Imagination and Attention: Simone Weil translating the Iliad
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics
Third Series, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Fall, 2007), pp. 29-36 (8 pages)
Two slices from the same loaf? Weil and Levinas on the demand of social Justice
Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 117-138
Simone Weil: A Sense of God
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, vol. 9, Number no. 1, pp. 127-144
Simone Weil: A Sense of God
There is one thread of thought no serious reader of Simone Weil can possibly miss from the variegated tapestry of her thinking. And that is her sense of God, which is almost naturally embedded therein. She unfailingly elevates her every insight to a level that is at once metaphysical or theological. Indeed, Weil considers all human concerns always “situated in the context of our relation to God.” She excludes nothing for she believes that even those practices not readily recognized as religious contribute to our spiritual development and prepare us for loving God. . . .
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, vol, 9, no. 1, Winter 2006, pp. 127-144
Homer and Simone Weil: The Iliad sub specie violentiae
Simone Weil’s varied writings are chapters in an autobiography of the mind, best understood in light of the zeal with which she lived life and expressed her thoughts. Although only thirty years old in 1939/40 when she wrote “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” she had already confronted a wide range of fundamental issues on a philosophical plane and carried over that struggle into her personal life. The ardor she brought to her intellectual pursuits and to the particular causes to which she devoted her time and energies makes Weil an attractive subject for biographers, as the spate of works on her life and career in the last thirty years attests.
Related
James P. Holoka, Simone Weil’s The Iliad or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition, Peter Lang Inc. (2006).
When Language Meets the Mind: Three Questions
Montesquieu Lecture
War, Suffering, and Detachment: Reading the Bhagavad Gītā with Simone Weil
Maria Clara Bingemer states she desires to do two things in her essay: “trace the personal and intellectual background against which Weil came to read the Gita” and “discuss some of the main themes which surface in her critical engagement with the text.” To this end, she begins with a brief biographical overview focusing on Weil’s encounter with the Gita. She then turns to a general discussion of how the Gita served as a source of inspiration for Weil, especially in the sense of contradiction giving rise to a spiritual crisis, which can lead to religious transformation through the vehicle of grace. The next section focuses on incarnation and salvation noting similarities and differences between Hinduism and Christianity in the understanding of these. A discussion of the distinction between force and violence in Weil’s work comes next followed by an in-depth discussion of necessity, detachment, and enlightenment. The chapter concludes with a thoughtful consideration of Weil’s critique of the Gita.
The essay appears in Catherine Cornille, ed., Song Divine : Christian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, Leuven, Peeters (2006), pp. 69-89
The Weil family
Common Knowledge, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 252-260
