Recommended
Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography
Joseph R. Berrigan, trans., University of Georgia Press
Simona Giurgea performing Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”
University Theater, Colgate University
Stephen Plant on Simone Weil: Parts I & II
Dr. Plant is Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall and lectures on Christian theology and on ethics in the Faculty of Divinity. He has written and edited several books including Bonhoeffer (Continuum, 2004), Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction (Orbis Books 2008), Letters to London (SPCK, 2013), and Taking Stock of Bonhoeffer ( Ashgate, 2014). From 2007-13 he edited the influential journal Theology for SPCK/SAGE. His current research includes theology and international development, on which he is writing a book for Bloomsbury Press, and the theology and life of Karl Barth. He is willing to consider doctoral students in 20th century Protestant theology, theology and international development, and political theology.
Education and the ethics of attention: The work of Simone Weil
This paper argues that the influential French thinker, Simone Weil, has something distinctive and important to offer educational and ethical inquiry. Weil’s ethical theory is considered against the backdrop of her life and work, and in relation to her broader ontological, epistemological and political position. Pivotal concepts in Weil’s philosophy – gravity, decreation, and grace – are discussed, and the educational implications of her ideas are explored. The significance of Weil’s thought for educationists lies in the unique emphasis she places on the development of attention, a notion elaborated here via the key themes of truth, beauty, and love.
British Journal of Educational Studies (Aug. 22, 2022)
- Professor Peter Roberts, University of Cambridge, School of Educational Studies & Leadership. His many works include “Simone Weil: Education, Spirituality and Political Commitment,” in Kirylo JD (ed.), A Critical Pedagogy of Resistance: 34 Pedagogues We Need to Know (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2013), pp. 129-132.
Decreation and the Ethical Bind
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”
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
Kotva Replies: Thinking through the Middle Voice
About Simone Weil by Eric Springsted
This biographical sketch is reproduced, with permission, from Eric Springsted, Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), pp. xix-xxi.
The Answer of Minerva: Pacificism and Resistance in Simone Weil
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)
