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“The Limits and Significance of Simone Weil’s Platonism”

Michel Narcy

in Doering, E. Jane & Springsted, Eric, eds, The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, Notre Dame: IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 23-42.

“Countermimesis and Simone Weil’s Christian Platonism”

Cyril O’Regan

in Doering, E. Jane & Springsted, Eric, eds, The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, Notre Dame: IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 181-208

The Death of Simone Weil (jazz perf.)

Darrell Katz (composer) Rebecca Shrimpton, Jazz Composers Alliance (JCA) Orchestra Abby, and Norm Group listen

Simone Weil was a Jew obsessed with Christian and Buddhist worldviews, a mystic who claimed to have visions of a realm beyond reality, and a reclusive philosopher who starved herself to death in 1941.

With music by Darrell Katz and text by Paula Tatarunis, “The Death of Simone Weil” deals with wild imagination, German occupation, desire, fishing, and the Pope. Weil’s story unfolds like a surreal jazz improvisation that seamlessly mixes modern composition and the entire jazz legacy into a mature and personal style.

The alto voice of Rebecca Shrimpton effortlessly captures the subtle shadings of the starkly beautiful text. Boston’s powerfully virtuosic Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra accompanies with fistfuls of fire.

“The Death of Simone Weil” stands out in the jazz vocal tradition in terms of both scale and ambition, and whose depth and economy of expression are worthy of the subject. All in all, it’s an exciting soirée with the far-out, the insane, and the beautifully strange.

Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other

J.P. Little, ed. & trans. read

In 1931, Simone Weil read an article by Louis Roubaud in the Petit Parisien that exposed the Yen Bay massacre in Indochina. That article opened Weil’s eyes, and from then until her death in exile in 1943, she cared most deeply about the French colonial situation. Weil refused to accept the contradiction between the image of France as a champion of the rights of man and the reality of France’s exploitation and oppression of the peoples in its territories.
Weil wrote thirteen articles or letters about the situation, writings originally published in French journals or in French collections of her work. J. P. Little’s fluid and clear translations finally introduce to English-speaking scholars and students this important element of Weil’s political consciousness.

J.P. Little, ed. & trans., New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003

J. P. Little, one of the world’s most respected scholars of Simone Weil, is the author of Simone Weil: Waiting on Truth and numerous articles and conference presentations on Weil’s life and work. She is lecturer in French (emerita) at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin.