Affliction
Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations
Kathryn Lawson & Joshua Livingstone, eds., Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)
Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil were two of the most compelling political thinkers of the 20th century who, despite having similar life-experiences, developed radically distinct political philosophies. This unique dialogue between the writings of Arendt and Weil highlights Arendt’s secular humanism, her emphasis on heroic action, and her rejection of the moral approach to politics, contrasted starkly with Weil’s religious approach, her faith in the power of divine Goodness, and her other-centric ethic of suffering and affliction.
The writings here respect the profound differences between Arendt and Weil whilst pulling out the shared preoccupations of power, violence, freedom, resistance, responsibility, attention, aesthetics, and vulnerability. Without shying away from exploring the more difficult concepts in these philosophers’ works, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil also aims to pull out the relevance of their writings for contemporary issues.
About the Editors
Kathryn Lawson is a Lecturer and Researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Simone Weil and Ecological Ethics: Decreation for the Anthropocene as well as several journal articles and book chapters on continental philosophy, religion, and Simone Weil.
Joshua Livingstone is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is author of a forthcoming book chapter on Hannah Arendt and the Free Press.
Attentive Pedagogy: Essays on Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
“Translations of Beauty: Simone Weil and literature” — the 2022 American Weil Society colloquy at the University of Notre Dame (Part I)
The Other
The Actor & Scholar in Conversation: Simona Giurgea and E. Jane Doering on Simone Weil
Lewes Public Library, Lewes (Delaware, US)
Simone Weil’s “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”: A Dramatic Rendition
Lewes Public Library, Lewes (Delaware, US)
Simone Weil and St. Teresa of Calcutta on Affliction
The author is the Provost and Academic Vice President of Assumption University.
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, vol. 24, no 4, Fall 2021, pp. 56-87
Inside Issue 3: New and Forthcoming
Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook
This article examines Sheila Watson’s interest in the notoriously difficult thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Watson read Weil’s work in English and French throughout the 1950s, especially during the time she spent in Paris in 1955 and 1956. While critics have examined Watson’s Paris journals for her discussion of modernists such as Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, little attention has been paid to her synthesis of, and response to, Weil’s thought in the same pages. Contextualizing Watson’s revisions to The Double Hook in her sustained reading of Weil, this article argues that Weil’s thought informs Watson’s aesthetic and ethical project in the novel.
The article analyses Watson’s understanding of three central concepts in Weil’s philosophy – decreation, affliction, and metaxu – and offers a Weilian reading of The Double Hook. By resituating Watson as a reader of Weil, the article also highlights the Canadian author’s belonging within a wider circle of women writers in the mid-century who, like Weil and Watson, also demanded unsentimental responses to violence and suffering.
University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 4 (Fall 2021, pp. 669-690.
