Recommended

“The Concept of Reading and the ‘Book of Nature’”

Stone & Stone

in Richard H. Bell, ed., Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward Divine Humanity, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93-115

Simone Weil’s The Iliad or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition

Simone Weil // James P. Holoka, ed. and trans. read

Simone Weil, a brilliant young teacher, philosopher, and social activist, wrote the essay, The ‘Iliad’ or the Poem of Force at France at the beginning of World War II. Her profound meditation on the nature of violence provides a remarkably vivid and accessible testament of the Greek epic’s continuing relevance to our lives. This celebrated work appears here for the first time in a bilingual version, based on the text of the authoritative edition of the author’s complete writings. An introduction discusses the significance of the essay both in the evolution of Weil’s thought and as a distinctively iconoclastic contribution to Homeric studies. The commentary draws on recent interpretations of the Iliad and examines the parallels between Weil’s vision of Homer’s warriors and the experiences of modern soldiers.

Peter Lang, Inc. (2006)

‘Negative Faith: The Moment of God’s Absence’: Simone Weil on Affliction

Sarwar A Abdullah read

This thesis focuses on Simone Weil’s philosophical, ethical, and religious perspectives on affliction by clarifying the essential difference between what is necessary and what is good. According to Weil, reality is governed by blind physical and moral necessities. She claims that we experience necessity as constraint and constraint as suffering. But affliction, she claims, is something essentially different; it is not reducible to mere suffering. I will argue that Weil’s conception of affliction can be best understood as a momentarily ‘numinous experience’ of God’s absence or the feeling of the absolute good. Numinous experience, according to Rudolf Otto, is a kind of experience that contains a quite specific moment and which remains ineffable. What is ineffable can only be felt. That is, Weil’s investigation of affliction concentrates on the feeling response to the absence or silence of God, the feeling which remains where language fails.

A thesis submitted to Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Theology and Religious Studies, July 2014

Reading Simone Weil in East London – Dr Anna Rowlands

Anna Rowlands watch

This presentation draws on empirical research conducted with Jesuit Refugee Service in London. It is grounded in the experience of refugees living in destitution in the UK asylum process into dialogue with the work of Simone Weil. These experiences are connected to work which began in dialogue with St Augustine and Hannah Arendt on time and temporality in the context of refugee experiences.

Our seminar programme offers students, scholars, and interested visitors an opportunity to learn more about aspects of Christian history and contemporary Christianity. The seminars are held in conjunction with the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University.

Find out more at www.cccw.cam.ac.uk.

Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide Webinar – 9th December 2021

Simone Weil: Marxism Outside Itself

Thomas Dommange read

S. Weil’s relationship to Marxism is paradoxical because it unveils a loyalty to Marx in spite of ruptures and renunciations of the Marxist theory. S. Weil’s ties to Marxism seem discontinuous because after having adopted certain revolutionary ideas during her first years of political activism she criticizes Marx in the 30’s and ends up seemingly abandoning him in the last part of her life. This path, however, far from revealing the slow and inexorable disappearance of Marx’s concepts, rather, demonstrates the persistence and metamorphoses in S. Weil’s philosophy. We suggest then, that a criticism of the revolution followed by a kind of Christianity developed in the wake of a year spent in the factory, constitute S. Weil’s own special manner of being Marxist, even though Marxism seems to have become useless to her.

Les Etudes Philosophiques, vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 207-222