The Need for Roots
Ros Schwartz, trans., Knopf (forthcoming 2022).
Keywords
Reading Simone Weil in East London – Dr Anna Rowlands
This presentation draws on empirical research conducted with Jesuit Refugee Service in London. It is grounded in the experience of refugees living in destitution in the UK asylum process into dialogue with the work of Simone Weil. These experiences are connected to work which began in dialogue with St Augustine and Hannah Arendt on time and temporality in the context of refugee experiences.
Our seminar programme offers students, scholars, and interested visitors an opportunity to learn more about aspects of Christian history and contemporary Christianity. The seminars are held in conjunction with the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University.
Find out more at www.cccw.cam.ac.uk.
Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide Webinar – 9th December 2021
Anemones—A Simone Weil Project
It is with great pleasure that we present Lisa Robertson’s Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, the fourteenth publication within the “If I Can’t Dance” Performance in Residence programme.
Three years ago, “If I Can’t Dance” invited poet and writer Lisa Robertson to develop an experimental research project based on her long-term study of medieval troubadour poetry and the invention of the rime in the historical region of Occitania. The scope of this investigation offered “If I Can’t Dance” an intriguing proposition to revisit genealogies of performance that sit outside the canons that define this rather young discipline. Troubadour poetry was composed and sung in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries using the Occitan vernacular language, a language of migratory confluences, where Arab, Jewish, Christian, and secular popular traditions blend and jostle. Unlike the stability and authority of Latin or of the then forming French territory to the north, troubadour rime culture elaborated a poetics of intermixture—linguistic, erotic, and mystical, in the southwest region of what is now France, in relation to Andalusian, Syrian and Palestinian cultural movements and influences, as well as to plant and animal neighbours. As Robertson explained at the Edition VIII—Ritual and Display introductory weekend in October 2019, this language “learn[ed] from birds, leaves and tree frogs as well as people”, each of which moved between lands and over the borders of political territories.
What was initially going to be a publication on the invention of the rime within these vocal and cultural movements eventually took a different turn. The archival research and the collaborations Robertson had envisioned for the project had to come to a halt due to the prolonged confinements provoked by the outbreak of Covid-19. In this space of arrest, Robertson encountered the essay “What the Occitan Inspiration Consists of,” penned by philosopher, mystic and political activist Simone Weil in 1942 for the Marseilles-based anti-fascist literary journal Les Cahiers du Sud. Written from within the devastations of World War II, Weil elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance that rejects force in all its forms. In a new annotated translation that lies at the heart of the volume, Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this notion, coming to terms with the broken lineage of troubadour culture, the legacy of Weil’s philosophical thought, and the violent context from which it emerged. In so doing, Robertson embraces the effect of both actualised and suppressed histories, testifying to friendship, readership, and the resistance of words across incommensurable distances.
Designed by Amsterdam-based Rietlanden Women’s Office, Anemones: A Simone Weil Project moves between poetry, the epistolary genre, and scholarly research. Echoing Weil’s philosophical concerns, the publication is also the site of a performance of dedication that takes the form of a series of floral actions conceived and realised by artist Benny Nemer. Carrying a letter written by Robertson, Nemer delivered an arrangement of flowers to seven people—artists, writers, poets—this book is dedicated to. The pages of the book then become the receptacle of a performativity that resists consumption and is not meant to be seen, announced, and disclosed, but rather imagined, whispered, and savoured in a moment of intimacy.
Ideas To Save Your Life
Ideas to Save Your Life follows Michael McGirr’s much-admired Books that Saved My Life (2018). This time, instead of sharing his love of literature, McGirr shares his love of philosophy, focusing on the works of twenty-plus eminent thinkers across history.
The book goes back to Pythagoras and comes forward to the contemporary Australian Frank Jackson; back to Mungo Woman and forward to Martha Nussbaum, by way of Simone Weil [Chapter 16] and Iris Murdoch. It is animated by two related questions: from where do we draw a sense of life’s purpose? And how can philosophy make life better? It ranges widely across subjects—from solitude to community, language to order, experience to ecstasy, the idea of good to that of a good idea.
McGirr’s approach is warm and inviting. Drawing on his many years of teaching philosophy to teenagers, he shares stories from his life and the lives of others. Ideas to Save Your Life is often funny, but it is always serious about the task of philosophy. It makes the impenetrable accessible, the indescribable palpable, and invites you to change how you see the world.
Text Publishing (2021) (ch. 16 on Weil and attention)
Reviewed by Gregory Day in The Sunday Morning Herald (Dec. 31, 2021)
Advent Evening of Reflection: Invitation from Simone Weil Catholic Worker
We are a domestic community at the intersection of a Catholic Worker house of hospitality to those in housing need, and a public household serving as node for neighborhood-based social, economic, and intellectual life. As our supporting non-profit, In My Backyard (IMBY), we invite neighbors and friends to support this work and support other nodes of these commitments.
The Catholic Worker
Our Christian commitment is reflected in our character as a Catholic Worker community of hospitality, offering:
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Supported, community-house living in our 2-house community (made up of the Simone Weil House and the Dorothy Day House, both on NE 15th), usually for folks who were camping in the orbit of St Francis Dining Hall or who come to us as an international refugee; and
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Weekly open-invitation meals and “open house” days, welcoming both friends neighbors wanting community, and friends and neighbors in need of respite, food, shower, and laundry facility. Recently, we also began hosting a PDX Free Fridge, which facilitates the sharing of food and other resources among folks in our neighborhood.
— For more information about the Simone Weil House, go here.
— See here for a related story.
Simone Weil: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Updated: Nov. 2021)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Nov. 24, 2021: updated here)
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone: Professor, Philosophy & Religion at the University of North Dakota
- BenjaminP. Davis: Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the Centre for Ethics, at the University of Toronto (Nov. 2021
Related:
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield (2019)
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone & Lucian Stone, Simone Weil and Theology, T&T Clark (2013)
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone & Lucian Stone, eds, The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, Bloomsbury T&T Clark (2009)
See also:
- “About Simone Weil” by Eric Springsted, Attention
Programme: Simone Weil and Religion
Symposium: Simone Weil on Religion
Keynote: Dr. Simone Kotva (University of Oslo) – “Rethinking agency in a more-than-human world with Simone Weil’
Transcendent Rebellion: The Influence of Simone Weil on Albert Camus’ Esthetics
ABSTRACT: The relationship between the thought of Albert Camus and Simone Weil has been partially explored by scholars since their deaths. However, current scholarship does not fully explain the influence Weil’s life and work had on Camus’ esthetics, a full treatment of which is necessary to truly understand the significance of Camus’ adoption of the idea of the rebel as artist. Camus’ thought progresses significantly from his early esthetics of the will in his Essay on Music, affirming art as fundamentally an egoistic act, to a later esthetics of transcendence, affirming the selflessness of artistic rebellion.
This paper argues that Camus’ development both mirrors Weil’s own philosophical development and corresponds to Camus’ exposure to and assimilation of Weil’s thought on decreation, beauty, and the transcendent. By establishing that Camus’ development in his esthetic and political theories corresponds to his exposure to and praise of Weil, I argue that Weil’s influence on Camus explains his later turn away from Nietzsche and to the affirmation of human nature, beauty in the world, and selfless rebellion and creation.
Perspectives on Political Science (Nov. 2021)
Philip Bunn is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research brings both ancient and modern political thought to bear on contemporary issues, with a focus on normative questions relating to technology.
Simone Weil’s Method: Essaying Reality through Inquiry and Action
Abstract
I read a selection of Simone Weil’s political philosophy in the way that she reads Marx – as forming “not a doctrine but a method of understanding and action.” My claim is that Weil’s method is likewise twofold: she attempts to understand the world through inquiry, then she tests her understanding through action. First, I read “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934). In that essay, inquiry, exemplified by Weil’s calling into question the term “revolution,” is her way of understanding reality around her, including forces of oppression and possibilities for liberation. Second, I read her “Factory Journal” (1934–1935), which records how she tested her theories from “Reflections” by placing herself in French factories. My conclusion states the fruits of Weil’s method for philosophy today: an interrogation of present political keywords (resistance, resilience) and a practice of philosophy as a way of life.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 13 (Nov. 23, 2021)
What Becomes of Agency in a More-Than-Human World?
This session explores alternative accounts of agency in stories that borrow their warp from dependency rather than autonomy and their weft from receptivity and passivity rather than effort and power-over. It is from this perspective that we greet the promise — but also the problem — of mysticism and new materialism. We think with those practices through which feelings of self-sufficiency are abandoned and what is experienced is a state of openness to the more-than-human: spiritual and divine, but also animal, vegetable, and mineral.
Hosted by Simone Weil denkkollektiv {by invitation only}
Jane Bennett is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Humanities at Johns Hopkins University
Simone Kotva is on the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.
