Recommended

Decreation in Simone Weil’s Theology

Zahra Qasemzadeh & Mostafa Mousavi Azam read

Abstract: Decreation is one of the central ideas in Simone Weil’s mysticism that first was introduced by her into the theological and mystical discourse of Christianity. Understanding the idea of decreation depends on understanding Weil’s model of creation. She believed that God, out of love, withdraws from His divinity so that the world of creation to be realized. Just as, in creation, God empties Himself of His divinity in order for man and the world to exist, so in decreation, man, by imitating God, also must empty himself of what has been given to him so that he can participate in creation as God wills.

Decreation isn’t just imitating God detaching Himself from His divinity; rather, it is a passive action which, in practice, must be waited for after giving all the attachments and fantasies up. Simone Weil, through the act of decreation, explains how to deny selfishness and avoid self-centeredness.

Religions & Mysticism, vol. 54, no. 1 (Summer/Autumn 2021), pp. 195-215

On Simone Weil and Giotto

Alexander Nemerov watch

Keynote Lecture delivered at the 2022 American Weil Society’s Friday Web Series, April 9, 2022.

Alexander Nemerov Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. His publications include Summoning Pearl Harbor (2017); Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (2016); Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (2005); and The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (2001). His most recent publication is Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (2021).

Co-sponsored by the American Weil Society and the Snite Museum of Art as part of “Translations of Beauty: Simone Weil and Literature,” XL Colloquy of the American Weil Society

Simone Weil: Waiting for God (parts 1 and 2)–The God Frequency

Abi Doukhan watch

Abi Doukhan is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY), and holds the Pearl and Nathan Halegua Family Initiative in Ethics and Tolerance. She holds a Masters in philosophy from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Nanterre, Paris, France. Her recent publications include Emmanuel Levinas: A Philosophy of Exile (Bloomsbury, October 2012), and Biblical Portraits of Exile (Routledge, June 2016).

YouTube class lecture (May 13, 2o22)

Decreation and the Ethical Bind

Yoon Sook Cha read

In Simone Weil’s philosophical and literary work, obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: the other’s self-affirmation and one’s own dislocation; what one has and what one has to give; a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand implied by asking nothing. The other’s claims upon the self―which induce unfinished obligation, unmet sleep, hunger―drive the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality at the heart of this book.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind is a study in decreative ethics in which self-dispossession conditions responsiveness to a demand to preserve the other from harm. In examining themes of obligation, vulnerability, and the force of weak speech that run from Levinas to Butler, the book situates Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech articulate ethical appeal and the vexations of response. It elaborates a form of ethics that is not grounded in subjective agency and narrative coherence but one that is inscribed at the site of the self’s depersonalization.

New York: Fordham University Press, 2020

Yoon Sook Cha received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.

“Christianity and the Errors of Time: Simone Weil on Atheism and Idolatry”

Mario Von der Ruhr

in Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca & Stone, Lucian, eds., The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, New York: Continuum, 2010, pp. 53-75

The Answer of Minerva: Pacificism and Resistance in Simone Weil

Thomas Merton read

in Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, (book review of Jacques Cabaud: Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love)