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Simone Weil and Resonance with Death – Simone Kotva & Hartmut Rosa

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Simone Kotva is a philosopher and theologian at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the philosophy of religion; environmental ethics; as well as magic and the occult. This year she published her new book titled “Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy” at Bloomsbury press. Hartmut Rosa is a philosopher and sociologist at the University of Jena and the director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies. With his resonance theory and his sociology of time he currently ranks as one of Germany’s most influential social philosophers. Today both engage with the philosophy of Simone Weil and present their thoughts if we can resonate with death.

 

“Decreation as Destruction or as Creation?”

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The ethical implications of Simone Weil’s “decreation” are perhaps the most controversial of her work and it is difficult to determine if she is asserting a violent destruction of the human body or a creation of the human spirit as linked with God. Rowan Williams claims that Weil’s decreation requires the “I” to dissolve completely and thus collapses the site of ethics but Yoon Sook Cha argues that the ethical site opened in Weil is not the “I” but the “in-between”. I will suggest that decreation holds both destruction/ death and creation/ life open in order to enter a radical shift in perspective from dualistic to relational through the creation of a bridge between the I and God.

Kathryn Lawson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

“Contesting Immigration Detention: St. Augustine & Simone Weil on use of Force”

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St. John’s University, CRS Global Campus Committee

The Famous Book She Never Wrote: The story of Simone Weil’s “Gravity and Grace”

Ronald Collins read

Gravity and Grace is one of her most-read works. First published in France in 1947, La Pésanteur et la grâce was received as a manifesto of faith for those searching for God’s presence in the black holes of an indifferent universe. Despite the claim on the book’s cover and title page, it is not a book that Weil wrote. True, its words were hers. But the conception, selection, organization, and rearrangement of those words into 39 compressed chapters with aphorism-like appeal were not her work product.

Washington Independent Review of  Books, April 16, 2020

The Logic of the Rebel: On Simone Weil and Albert Camus

Robert Zaretsky read

Excerpt: “. . . . The letter writer and analyst, it turns out, had more than tuberculosis in common. The former, Albert Camus, and the latter, Simone Weil, went on to become two of France’s most famous thinkers and writers. Camus had already established himself during the war not just as the author of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, but also the editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat. By the time of France’s liberation, the French-Algerian writer had become the face — a rather Humphrey Bogartian one at that — of the French Resistance. Sixty years later — he died in a car crash in January 1960 — Camus is also the face of French existentialism.

As for Simone Weil, fame had to wait. She certainly did not seek it out — as evidenced by the many contradictory things she did during her short life. Weil taught philosophy to middle-class students and Greek tragedy to industrial workers; she organized French pacifist movements and carried a gun alongside republicans during the Spanish Civil War; she was fluent in Greek, Latin, English, and German, and worked on assembly lines in a series of factories; she was born into a secular French-Jewish family and died as a near-convert to Roman Catholicism. . . .”

Los Angeles Review of Books (March 7, 2020)

Robert Zaretsky is the author, among other things, of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (2021).