Keywords

Ukraine: Apparent War Crimes in Russia-Controlled Areas

read

Excerpt: “(Warsaw) – Human Rights Watch has documented several cases of Russianmilitary forces committing laws-of-war violations against civilians in occupied areas of the Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv regions of Ukraine. These include a case of repeated rape; two cases of summary execution, one of six men, the other of one man; and other cases of unlawful violence and threats against civilians between February 27 and March 14, 2022. Soldiers were also implicated in looting civilian property, including food, clothing, and firewood. Those who carried out these abuses are responsible for war crimes. . . .”

Human Rights Watch (April 2, 2022)

2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis

Wikipedia read

Except: “An ongoing refugee crisis began in Europe in late February 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. More than 4.3 million refugees have since left Ukraine (as of 5 April 2022), while an estimated 6.5 million people have been displaced within the country (as of 18 March 2022). In total, more than ten million people – approximately one-quarter of the country’s total population – had left their homes in Ukraine by 20 March. By March 24, 2022, according to UNICEF, more than half of all children in Ukraine had been forced to leave their homes. The invasion has caused Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II and its aftermath,[6] the first of its kind in Europe since the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, and one of the largest refugee crises in the world in the 21st century, with the highest refugee flight rate in the world . . . .” {notes ommitted}

Date visited: 5 April 2022

The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Translating Simone Weil

American Weil Society event watch

Translating is a formidable task. Three translators of Simone Weil’s works: Ros Schwartz, translator of Weil’s L’Enracinement (forthcoming from Penguin UK) and Philip Wilson and Sylvia Panizza, translators of Weil’s Venise Sauvée and poems (Bloomsbury Press) discussed some of the challenges.

Tess Lewis, an internationally recognized translator, moderated the discussion.

Presented on April 1st, during the 2022 American Weil Society’s annual colloquy at Notre Dame University in Indiana.

For Simone Weil, philosophy was not merely academic

 Charles Scriven read

Excerpt: “It’s commonplace to note the contradictions in Simone Weil’s life. She was an anarchist and a conservative, a pacifist and a warfighter, a French patriot and a critic of France, a Jew who was buried in the Catholic section of an English cemetery. Robert Zaretsky believes that these contradictions reflect “inevitable tensions” that arose as Weil inhabited her philosophical convictions. For her, philosophy could not be merely an academic discipline; it had to be a “way of life.” You had to accept the consequences of the truth you told, had to live them out, and that was complicated. . . .”

The Christian Century (April 11, 2022) (reviewing Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil)

Charles Scriven is the author of The Transformation of Culture: Christian Social Ethics after H. Richard Niebuhr (Herald Press).

Book Review: “The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas”

Fouad Mami. read

In The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, Robert Zaretsky offers a new biography of the influential French thinker through exploring five key concepts within her body of work. Zaretsky’s thematic study will inspire readers to find resistance in the power of paying deep attention, just as Weil passionately and convincingly argued, writes Fouad Mami.

LSE* Review of Books (April 2022)

*London School of Economics

Springsted on Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil

Eric Springsted read

Excerpt:

“. . . On the whole, Zaretsky tends to round most of the edges off Weil. In part, this is a matter of reinforcing a liberal sense of the good and using her to be a shining example of that. Philosophically, it is the result of trying to skate around the hard edges of her religious thinking. For Zaretsky, attention is not supernatural; the divine is not the place we are forced to find purpose when confronting affliction; societies can be made up of nice committed people without higher callings. All this is reinforced in the final chapter where Zaretsky does take on Weil’s religion. He lays out the religious experiences that led to her conversion, making that conversion largely a matter of belief, ignoring the personal sense of Christ that she experienced. It was this personal sense of unconquerable love in a person that caused her to find a use for affliction; it was Christ’s own crucifixion that lay at the center of her understanding of attention, for attention is a self-emptying to give life to another. Zaretsky does note with concern that there is a kenotic quality to Weil’s religion and then quickly shifts the conversation to the soft Platonism of Iris Murdoch, who indeed owed much to Weil. But in the end, what this religious factor amounts to for him is chiefly “do-gooding,” without the mordancy of Weil’s uncompromising transcendence and mysticism. Whether one can build politics or ethics on such transcendence and mysticism is debatable. But to have the debate, you have to articulate the ideas rightly and clearly.

So, in the end, it seems to be that it is Weil who is being subverted here. I wish I could say it was done deeply. But the problem is that the book just does not engage in any kind of in-depth examination of Weil’s thinking as she expressed it. It is a paraphrase, it is rounding. It is within the author’s own experience (there is no bibliography, for example). Love Weil or hate Weil—there are plenty of people that go each way—a reader will be better off with something more substantial.”

Review of Politics, vol. 84, no. 2 (March 10, 2022), pp. 294-296

Note: Robert Zaretsky was invited to reply in this Journal but declined.