Forthcoming: Special Collaborative Issue on Simone Weil & Art

This special issue on Metaxy Journal (in partnership with Attention).

Simone Weil has influenced artists and writers across different countries and traditions, including poets and authors such as Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, T. S. Eliot, Cristina Campo, Elsa Morante, Anne Carson, Jan Zwicky, and Timothy Snyder; musicians such as Patti Smith; theatre-makers, and filmmakers such as Liliana Cavani and Roberto Rossellini. 

At the same time, recent scholarship has explored both her philosophy of poetry and art more broadly, as well as the influence that poets and artists (from Sophocles to Paul Valéry, George Herbert, Paul Cézanne, and Gregorian music) exerted on her thought. Studies by scholars including Eric O. Springsted (1996), Katherine Brueck (1995), Cynthia Wallace (2024), Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson (2023; 2019), and others have contributed to this growing field.

This Special Issue seeks to bring together researchers working on Weil and art from a variety of such perspectives, offering a snapshot of the manifold connections between her philosophy and the artistic experience. It also welcomes papers that explore new adaptations of Weil’s philosophy through art, as well as contributions that map less-studied or as yet unrecognised presences of Weil in artists’ work and, conversely, the presence of artists identified in Weil’s own works.

Call for Papers

The bilingual call for papers (in English and Italian) invites new contributions on the theme ‘Simone Weil and Art’: Weil’s influence on artists; artists’ influence on Weil; her philosophy of art; and related questions. All selected papers from the open call will be published in Metaxy Journal, in either Italian or English, according to the language of submission.

The Special issue is developed in collaboration with the AIRE Research Collective, a Weil-inspired collective that advocates a non-individualistic, collaborative, and attentive approach to academic research. In keeping with this ethos, the issue will experiment with an ‘attentive’ peer-review process (AIRE), structured around guidelines that promote open (non-blind), collaborative, transparent, and supportive forms of review.

The call for abstracts will be published in March on the Metaxy Journal and AIRE websites.

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