Decreation

Poetry As Decreation: Impersonality and Grace in T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil

Emily M. King read

This thesis posits that however separated T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil are by circumstance, political affinity, and Church affiliation, their thoughts intersect at a crucial point. While Weil’s theory of decreation and Eliot’s notion of impersonality are often cast as theological and poetic innovations, they both hearken back to the Christian mystical tradition – specifically, the aspect of via negativa. Placed alongside one another, Weil’s poetic mysticism and Eliot’s concern for the spiritual reveal the capacity of poems to decreate and bring the reader to a moment of void that awaits the fulfillment of grace. This thesis will study these topics with express consideration of Eliot’s Four Quartets and Weil’s notebooks, especially Gravity and Grace.

Honor’s Thesis, Department of English, Stanford University, May 2019.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind

Yoon Sook Cha read

In Simone Weil’s philosophical and literary work, obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: the other’s self-affirmation and one’s own dislocation; what one has and what one has to give; a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand implied by asking nothing. The other’s claims upon the self―which induce unfinished obligation, unmet sleep, hunger―drive the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality at the heart of this book.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind is a study in decreative ethics in which self-dispossession conditions responsiveness to a demand to preserve the other from harm. In examining themes of obligation, vulnerability, and the force of weak speech that run from Levinas to Butler, the book situates Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech articulate ethical appeal and the vexations of response. It elaborates a form of ethics that is not grounded in subjective agency and narrative coherence but one that is inscribed at the site of the self’s depersonalization.

New York: Fordham University Press, 2020

Yoon Sook Cha received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.

Traces of Resurrection: The Pattern of Simone Weil’s Mysticism

Stuart Jesson read

Abstract: In her “Letter to a Priest,” Simone Weil makes the following, typically bold, assertion concerning belief in the Resurrection: “Hitler could die and return to life again fifty times, but I should still not look upon him as the Son of God. And if the gospel omitted all mention of Christ’s Resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me.”1 This statement has often served as an indication that Weil’s version of Christian mysticism has no place for the Resurrection. Throughout the collection of short essays, articles, and notebooks produced at the end of her life Weil reflects frequently, in profound and intriguing ways, on the significance of death, its effect on human thought, and its place in moral and spiritual life. Not only is death “the source of all untruth and of all truth for men,”2 the crucifixion of Christ becomes the center not only of her spirituality but also of her metaphysics; creation, for Weil, is the cross that crucifies God.3 In some of the more extreme formulations scattered through the notebooks, in particular, Weil gives that impression that she sees life as a cosmic mistake that it is the task of spiritual life to rectify, through acceptance of death: “Birth involves us in the original sin, death redeems us from it.”4 Death is the humiliating destiny of all finite creatures, but if one can refuse the various compulsive ways there are of evading the thought of this, and consent to, or even love this necessity, one thereby participates in the process of “decreation,” the eradication of the autonomous self.

Stuart Jesson, “Traces of Resurrection: The Pattern of Simone Weil’s Mysticism,” in T. Cattoi T. & C.M. Moreman, eds, Death, Dying, and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2015), pp. 49-64.

Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera

Anne Carson read

Simone Weil described “decreation” as “undoing the creature in us” — an undoing of self. In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as an opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. As she makes her way through these forms she slowly dismantles them, and in doing so seeks to move through the self, to its undoing.

_____________

“One of the most interesting gatherings of material that any poet has published within living memory. . . . She is quite unlike any other poet writing today.” –The Economist

“Exhilarating . . . Carson takes risks, subverts literary conventions, and plays havoc with our expectations. She is a wonder: an unconventional poet who has a huge following among today’s readers of poetry and whose work has been honored with our most prestigious literary awards . . . When it comes to content, most poetry is boring compared to Carson’s . . . She writes as if every poet, writer, religious thinker, and philosopher who has ever lived is still our contemporary . . . Carson is immensely learned. [Her] prose, with its clarity, compactness, and memorable epigrams, reminds me of Emerson . . . To work with fragments of ancient lyric poems, as Carson does, is to [be] an archaeologist of the invisible whose tools are her learning and her imagination . . . She is interested in her characters in a way that most poets are not. Her language is the language of fiction and the manner in which the stories are told resembles magical realism with its wild imaginings and its carnival atmosphere. As for her subject matter, she writes perceptively and amusingly about men and women in love, their jealousies, their misunderstandings, and the solitude which they are not able to overcome . . . The essays in Decreation are full of marvelous insights . . . What the poet and the authentic thinker share, according to Heidegger, is their ability to wonder at how things exist and to live with that wonder. Carson reminds us that poeticizing in this broader philosophical sense and in the narrow sense of the poetic have always been related. The play of philosophical ideas makes [all] her books worth reading . . . Enthralling, masterful, engaging, stunning, inspired, impressive, profoundly moving, poignant, probing.”–The New York Review of Books

“Cool, resolute, smart, and lovely . . . Carson has emerged in the last two decades as a kind of prophet of the unknowable. Decreation may be her loneliest book–a theological treatise and dramatization of how to escape one’s self . . . Carson attempts [this task] with great tenderness, framing the undoing as a work of love that compels one to forsake oneself in order to be something more–truer, more luminous, and also more transient. Carson moves from form to form–poetry, essay, screenplay–and from body to body . . . In the shape traced by Carson’s rapid flight patterns one can almost discern a transcendent emptiness, uninhabitable to more stationary souls.”–The Village Voice

Vintage (2006)

“Decreation, or Saying Yes,”

William Robert read

Epoché: The University of California Journal for the Study of Religion, Vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 59-85.

“Simone Weil and Wallace Stevens: The Notion of Decreation as Subtext in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’”

James R. Lindroth

in Dunaway, John M. & Springsted, Eric. O., The Beauty that Saves: Essays on Aesthetics and Language in Simone Weil, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, pp. 151-171