Affliction

Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook

Kait Pinder read

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.

Affliction in Simone Weil’s Thought

Mostafa Mousavi Azam, Zahra Qasemzade & Ehsan Momtahan read

The world has always been subject to a destructive evil, and every human being has experienced suffering in some way in his/her life. Therefore, if we do not look at evil with the connivance, we can find that the study of human suffering can constitute a part of the human’s answers about evil. By propounding affliction, Simon Weil not only tries to answer some questions about evil, but also introduces the human to his other dimensions through affliction, as she introduces it as a step towards self-knowledge. For the self-alienated human of the modern world, the answer to causes of affliction is a liberating gift due to his return to his true self, because what truly liberates the human is the understanding of truth, and affliction helps him to achieve it. Therefore, in this article, the issue of affliction in the thought of this French scholar is examined in a descriptive-analytical manner by referring to Simone Weil’s main works and those of her commentators.

Philosophy of Religion, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer 2021), pp. 175-200.