Recommended
Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy
London: Rowman & Littlefield International
Weil’s Single-Minded Commitment to Truth: A Q & A Interview with J. P. Little
Weil Scholars
A linked listing of noted Weil scholars in the United States and elsewhere.
1938 Letter to Georges Bernanos
From Georges Bernanos, Correspondance inédite 1934-1948: Combat pour la liberté (Plon, c1971).
Simone Weil’s Travels: Geography
The following is a list of the countries, cities, and regions in which Simone Weil grew up and later traveled to in her lifetime.
Poetry As Decreation: Impersonality and Grace in T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil
This thesis posits that however separated T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil are by circumstance, political affinity, and Church affiliation, their thoughts intersect at a crucial point. While Weil’s theory of decreation and Eliot’s notion of impersonality are often cast as theological and poetic innovations, they both hearken back to the Christian mystical tradition – specifically, the aspect of via negativa. Placed alongside one another, Weil’s poetic mysticism and Eliot’s concern for the spiritual reveal the capacity of poems to decreate and bring the reader to a moment of void that awaits the fulfillment of grace. This thesis will study these topics with express consideration of Eliot’s Four Quartets and Weil’s notebooks, especially Gravity and Grace.
Honor’s Thesis, Department of English, Stanford University, May 2019.
Theatre as Creative Failure: Simone Weil’s Venise sauvée Revisited
Abstract: Simone Weil’s dramatic criticism and dramatic writing offer a way of reconceptualizing what it means to engage critically under fascist censorship. This essay explores her closet drama Venise sauvée as an example of her embrace of writing political resistance in a time when classical theatre criticism was absent and artistic resistance had been made futile. Simone Weil called for an awakening in the audience to acknowledge their responsibility of how they let theatre shape their way of thinking about war. I demonstrate that Weilian theatre theory does not only consider the stage an object to be analyzed, but also the very subject through whose lenses one can undertake a critical reshaping of ways to interpret the world. In this dramatic view on WW II Weil exhibits the artistic voices of resistance in occupied France as caught in its own echo chambers and thus no longer perceptible in society. The essay reads her unfinished historical tragedy Venise sauvée and its central motif of the silenced voice of resistance as an implicit warning to the contemporary théâtre resistant to become the agent of its own irrelevance. I propose that beyond this warning there lies a theory of deconstructing propaganda theatre by unleashing the creative power of theatre’s failure, namely via a distortion of the socially synchronized inner and outer stage of the audience.
Platform, Vol. 13, No. 1, On Criticism, Autumn 2019, pp. 17-30
