“Saints, Scandals, and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini”
PhilPapers, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 16-32
Keywords
Overlapping Consensus Thin and Thick: John Rawls and Simone Weil
John Rawls and Simone Weil presented two distinct conceptions of political justice, aimed at articulating a common ethos in an inherently heterogeneous society. The terms of the former, chiefly concerned with the distribution of primary goods, underwrite much of today’s Western democracy’s political liberalism. The terms of the latter, chiefly concerned with the way interaction is organized in social activities in view of the body and soul’s balancing pairs of needs, are less well known. We explain the sense in which the overlapping consensus in Weil’s notion of political justice is “thicker”, and may thus deserve more attention – alongside that of Rawls – for substantiating a democratic ethos within political liberalism.
Philosophical Investigations 39:4 October 2016, pp. 362-384
On the Abolition of Political Parties: Simone Weil and the Politics of Populism
Presented at The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference, University of Montreal, Canada; Mark Devenney, University of Brighton, author and presenter.
God Isn’t Dead, He’s Silent’: Simone Weil Dies, Very Young
Jewish World
Interview with Benjamin Braude
The Boisi Center, no. 102
Simone’s Svengalis: A Petainist, a Missionary, and the Making of Simone Weil
Abstract
Two of the first books published in the name of the brilliant absolutist Simone Weil (1909-43), La Pesanteur el la Grâce (Gravity and Grace) (1947/8) and Attente au Dieu (Waiting on/for God) (1950), were tendentiously fashioned. Consequently, the packaging that her Svengalis—the Petainist Gustave Thibon and the missionary Joseph-Marie Perrin—imposed, so severely distorted her thought that the first is no longer considered by French specialists to be her own work and the second has no stable text. Nevertheless, these two problematic books have defined Simone Weil. This [interview] reveals the origins and purposes of the books that Thibon and Perrin created.
Boisi Center (Feb. 11, 2015).
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Benjamin Braude is an associate professor of history at Boston College. His research focuses on the construction of collective identities in the Middle East and Europe, as well as Jewish and Ottoman history. He spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before his presentation on the controversial legacy of 20th-century philosopher Simone Weil at the Boisi Center.
A Strange Christian: Simone Weil
This article appears in Katherine Davies & Toby Garfitt, eds., God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid–Twentieth Century, New York: Fordham University Press (2015), pp. 69-87.
Florence de Lussy is the honorary general curator in the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France and has devoted 27 years to editing The Complete Works of Simone Weil.
God’s Mirror presents perspectives on intellectual, cultural, and political questions faced by French and French-Canadian intellectuals who engaged with Catholicism in the period 1930-50, in the diverse but related fields of philosophy, theology, politics, literature, and music. Names include Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Paul Valéry, Simone Weil, and many others.
Traces of Resurrection: The Pattern of Simone Weil’s Mysticism
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.
Mystic of Passion and Compassion
Karen M. Kraft, trans., foreword by Tomeu Estelrich, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books
From the Cave to the Cross : The Cruciform Theology of George Grant and Simone Weil
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