Recommended
Choices are Made in Heaven (or How my Work on Weil Began)
Springsted on Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil
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.
The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later
New York: Continuum (preface by Jacques Cabaud)
Prologue
(from First & Last Notebooks)
The Work of Simone Weil: An Educational Mission
The paper investigates the question if Simone Weil’s thought is unitary or fragmentary, if one can speak of a “system” concerning her theoretical approach, and if her works are still current. The paper suggests a re-reading of Weil’s reflections to find in them an educative aim.
“A pilgrim of thought
When one approaches the greatness of Weilian philosophy, one is inevitably taken by very conflicting emotions: this woman of genius inspires strong passions.
Simone Weil, an ascetic, uncontrollable, overpowering woman, literally fed herself either on the words of peasants and workers or on reading her classic works, forgetting to eat.
She refused all obliging solutions in order to be always ready to confront herself with the innovation and variety of situations, without examining them through the reassuring methods of memberships.
A double misrepresentation of the figure of Simone Weil emerges from the critics’ interpretations: the first one, based on hagiographic criteria, makes
her a separate, singular case, by distinguishing the years of her political commitment from the last years, which are characterized by a mystical and religious experience, and the second one, which attempts to equate her, in all ways, with the other intellectuals of her time.
From this interpretative hodgepodge, therefore, the image of Simone Weil emerges as that of a sensitive, lucid, and committed intellectual who moves from civil rejection to contemplative acceptance of the fracture between manual and intellectual work, from a complaint of the factory regime to the dream of a domestic industry, and from the condemnation of the Soviet-style State to the proposal for a Constitutional Act that prohibits parties. . . . “
This paper is based on the report presented in English at the XVII Congreso Internacional del Grupo.
Daniela De Leo: Professore Aggregato di Filosofia Teoretica – Università del Salento.
“Translations of Beauty: Simone Weil and literature” — the 2022 American Weil Society colloquy at the University of Notre Dame (Part I)
Interview: The Philosophy of Simone Weil with Eric O. Springsted
Podcast interview with Eric Springsted about his career, his life work on Weil, and his latest book on her, along with comments on Plato, Wittgenstein, St. John of the Cross, and Kierkegaard.
Hermitix (July 7, 2021)
A Philosophy “written for everyone”: From Alain to Simone Weil
Peter Winch in India 1986 Lecture on Simone Weil
This is a talk given by Peter Winch in 1986 when he would have been nearing completion of his Simone Weil:“The just Balance” (1989). The talk was given to a small group in Mahabaleshwar in the Indian state of Maharashtra, and the transcription by Michael Campbell is from a recording made by Prabodh Parikh who, with Probal Dasgupta and Michael McGhee, initiated the Convivium series of meetings between Indian and Western philosophers.
Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 19-39
