Recommended
The Theology of Simone Weil and the Topology of André Weil
Religious Studies in Japan, Vol.1, no. 1, pp. 1-14
“Simone Weil on Beauty”
in Richard H. Bell, ed., Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward Divine Humanity, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 260-276
The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil
Madison: WI: University of Wisconsin Press
Simone Weil: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Updated: Nov. 2021)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Nov. 24, 2021: updated here)
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone: Professor, Philosophy & Religion at the University of North Dakota
- BenjaminP. Davis: Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the Centre for Ethics, at the University of Toronto (Nov. 2021
Related:
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield (2019)
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone & Lucian Stone, Simone Weil and Theology, T&T Clark (2013)
- A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone & Lucian Stone, eds, The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, Bloomsbury T&T Clark (2009)
See also:
- “About Simone Weil” by Eric Springsted, Attention
A Critique of Greatness
Abstract: “This article outlines and contextualizes Simone Weil’s critique of greatness and its contemporary relevance. Weil argues that the greatness of conquest and colonization is ersatz greatness based on violence. For Weil, worshipping greatness is a path to fascism. Drawing from this, I argue that Weil’s critique provides an opening for the abolition of greatness as a political narrative. To make this second move, I expand Weil’s critique of the historically situated concept of greatness to challenge reactionary ideals of history in the contemporary US contextualized by referencing controversies about statue removals and Critical Race Theory in primary education.”
Excerpt: “No thinker has more accurately diagnosed the problem of greatness than the French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil (1909- 1943). What is at stake in this article is Weil’s critique of greatness and how this greatness is historically constructed. I propose that through Weil’s critique of greatness as it is understood by the so-called West as an ersatz, or false and ungodly, form of greatness, space may be made for the abolition of greatness as a political narrative. I approach the question of greatness through Weil’s own materialist genealogy of history and ideology critique.
Inspired by the statue removals in the United States and elsewhere in 2020 and 2021 and spurred on by the public debates about education, including the right-wing reaction to The 1619 Project, The 1776 Project, and so-called Critical Race Theory in 2021, 2022, and 2023, this article is a small contribution to the project of undermining prevailing historical narratives through a critical analysis of Weil’s idiosyncratic political thinking about conceptions of greatness. In this reading of Weil, she takes up Walter Benjamin’s call to write history from the vantage of the oppressed6 through her “second magnum opus” The Need for Roots. The purpose of Benjamin’s and Weil’s twin demands is not an inversion of greatness from the powerful to the powerless. Instead, Weil reconstitutes historical narratives to reject greatness as a weapon of the powerful against the powerless. Importantly, Weil builds her critique of greatness through its roots in colonialism, colonization, whiteness, and the origins of the modern state.
In the context of her political thought, the critique of greatness comes late, growing out of Weil’s analysis of the state, capitalism, fascism, and her materialist-mystical conceptions of deracination and attention. Within her oeuvre, The Need for Roots stands as Weil’s most comprehensive work. Weil described it, in a letter to her parents, as a “second magnum opus,” following her “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934). Written at the behest of Free French Forces in London to address potential issues with trade unions, The Need for Roots takes up the conditions in France that led to the Nazi conquest and the capitulation of both the Occupied Zone and Vichy to the imprisonment and extermination of Jews, Roma, disabled humans, LGBTQIA+ identified individuals, socialists, and communists. The origins of Weil’s own historical realities are both part of the historical process and status that Weil calls deracination [uprootedness] . . . .”
- Scott B. Ritner, “A Critique of Greatness,” Theory & Event, vol. 26, no. 2 (April 2023), pp. 345-367
Related
- Ronald Collins, “What is Greatness? On Reading the Past,” in Eric Springsted & Ronald Collins, eds., A Declaration of Duties toward Humankind: A Critical Companion to Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots (forthcoming 2024).
- Simone Weil, “Hitler and the Idea of Greatness: Force is Our Only Measure,” Commentary (July 1950) (excerpted from L’Enracinement, Bernard Frechtman trans.)
Simona Giurgea performing Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”
University Theater, Colgate University
The Subversive Simone Weil: Robert Zaretsky in conversation with Lottie Moore
Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London, and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky’s “The Subversive Simone Weil” gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions – the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. In this conversation with philosopher of religion Lottie Moore, Zaretsky reflects on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, and why her ideas matter and continue to fascinate readers today. Robert Zaretsky is a professor of French history in the University of Houston Honors College, and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. He is the author of numerous books on thinkers including Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Albert Camus. His new book, “The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas”, was published in February by Chicago University Press. Lottie Moore studied Theology at Bristol University before completing an MA in Political Theology at Mansfield College, Oxford, where she focused on identity politics. She currently works at a policy institute leading a project on UK health inequality and at SOAS, where she looks at issues surrounding freedom of speech.
On Philosophy: Digital Lectures Series, YouTube, May 2, 2021
Simone Weil Society’s Annual Colloquy (2026): Roots, Exile, and Migration
Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Decreation for the Anthropocene
Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil (Routledge, 2024) places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene.
The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil’s work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically-based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology.
Kathryn Lawson argues that Weil’s work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations to much more than just other human beings. She suggests that the process of “decreation” in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. This allows readers to consider what it means to be human in this time and place, and to contemplate our ethical responsibilities both to other humans and also to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the book uses Weil’s thought to decenter the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics.
This book will be useful for Simone Weil scholars and academics, as well as students and researchers interested in environmental ethics in departments of comparative literature, theory and criticism, philosophy, and environmental studies.
* * * * *
Table of Contents
Introduction: Finding Simone Weil in an Ecological Void
Part I: Growing Roots: A Reading of Simone Weil
1. Mapping an Ethics of Decreation
2. The Faculties
3. The Power of Force
4. Attention and Mediation
5. Decreation and Action
Part II: Plato and the Environment
6. Contemporary Dualist Ecological Readings of Plato’s Phaedrus
7. A Non-dual Reading of Plato via Metaxu (μεταξύ)
Part III: Decreation for the Anthropocene
8. Weil and Anthropocene Ethics
9. A Weilian-Inspired Ecological Ethics
10. Action in the Anthropocene
About the Author
Kathryn Lawson is a lecturer of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is co-editor of Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations (2024) and Breached Horizons: The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion(2017) and author of a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters.
Related
Kathryn Lawson & Joshua Livingstone, eds., Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)
