“Theoretical Picture of a Free Society” (1934)
The Partly Examined Life Podcasts
Keywords
An Impersonal Liberalism: Simone Weil and the Sacred
Simone Weil in her essay “Human Personality,” asks her audience to think about liberalism’s response to Nazi Germany through the “United Nations Declaration of Human Rights,” posed as a struggle between the personal and the impersonal. Weil was a notable Marxist, and was a Catholic who never joined the Church; she lived and thought in liminality. Weil’s work as a political theologian is often forgotten; however, her critique of liberalism resonates in a world in which responses to neoliberalism are often a calling back to liberalism.
Epoché, no. 34.
“Silence Is Violence”: Simone Weil on the Impossible Demands of Justice
“In response to the murder of George Floyd by police in the USA, cities around the world held anti-racist demonstrations calling on both citizens and states to acknowledge the continued proliferation of systemic racism in our societies. Over the weekend of June 6 and 7, Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester, England, was filled with cries of grief and demands for change. Incantations of ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ and ‘I CAN’T BREATHE’ cut through a crowd mobilised by an act of gratuitous violence that came to represent the vicious legacy of centuries of white supremacism. In addition to the chants, there were written placards and an enormous volume of social media posts seeking to (i) diagnose the problem of contemporary racial injustices and (ii) articulate solutions to this problem. . . .”
The Philosophical Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books Channels Project.
“Simone Weil on Human Needs” (Part Three)
The Partly Examined Life Podcasts
Dangerous Doublespeak: On Weil, Orwell, and the Perils of Political Parties
In contemporary America, the signposts point to George Orwell’s 1984, that dystopian society where contradictions are etched in stone, and where truth is its opposite. It is a dimension of mind, a dormant mind, in which the truths of the party defy all other truths, where party loyalty trumps all other loyalties, and where the party line is the line to be toed.
In this domain, political parties become ends in themselves, as if they embodied all truth.
Start there, and you can begin to understand why Simone Weil (1909-1943) called for the abolition of political parties. Radical? Indeed. Then again, sometimes it takes an outsider to alert us to what we cannot see within the confines of our own political predicament.
Washington Independent Review of Books
“Simone Weil on Human Needs” (Part Two)
The Partly Examined Life Podcasts
“Simone Weil on Human Needs” (Part One)
The Partly Examined Life Podcasts
The Weil Conjectures
Washington Independent Review of Books
The Problem of Force: Simone Weil’s Supernatural Justice
The Point, web only, (August 7, 2020).
La personne et le sacré: collectivité, personne, impersonnel, droit, justice
H-France Review, vol. 20, no. 143, pp. 1-5.
