Against Algebra: Simone Weil’s Critique of Modern Science and Its Mathematics
Explorations in Knowledge, vol. 4, pp. 47-73
Recommended
“Why You Should Think That God Does Not Exist (Simone Weil, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Aquinas)”
chatforgod.com
The Politics of Rootedness: On Simone Weil and George Orwell
Simone Weil and George Orwell both reflected—at a time when liberalism and Christianity were being challenged—on how to provide rootedness to societies and how to provide a moral anchoring and collective inspiration. The chapter considers the extent to which religion plays an important role in these authors’ politics of rootedness. A comparison between them suggests that rather than worrying first about whether or not we need a religious revival, we should worry about whether individuals have the opportunity to enter into contact with beauty. For both Weil and Orwell, a society is well-rooted when there is a continuity between natural beauty and social life. As such, a politics of rootedness entails, in their view, a genuine search for the recognition of all members of a collectivity and, above all, the search for a way of learning again how to find nourishment in the beauty of the world.
in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103-123.
Waiting for God
Foreword by Janet Soskice, New York: Routledge.
Pacifist, soldier, mystic, saint: The complex identity of Simone Weil
Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 2021 (reviewing Robert Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil) century French philosopher.
“About a year and a half ago, a bookseller in Princeton, New Jersey, told me that she’d lately noticed an uptick in sales of titles by Simone Weil, the twentieth-century philosopher. Donald Trump had something to do with it, I imagined: living under a regime of facile lies, more readers had been drawn to Weil’s difficult search for truth. While these book-buyers were seeking her guidance on their own, Robert Zaretsky, a professor at the University of Houston, publicly tried to steer more readers to Weil, writing a series of essays, for outlets including the New York Times and Foreign Affairs, in which he invoked some of Weil’s ideas as correctives, a means of seeing our way past the ruts and bromides of contemporary politics. . . . “
The Impersonal and the Other On Simone Weil (1907-43
The European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 183-200
The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one’s voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous.
“To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.
in Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2007, p. 108-143. Previously published: “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29 (Winter 2003), pp. 216-252
“La Passion De Simone”
Operavision
On the Abolition of All Political Parties
Retrieved by The Anarchist Library (2020), Simon Leys, trans., (2013).
Simone Weil: Writing for a General Intellectual Audience
In this video, Professor Toril Moi explains the internal editorial process related to her London Review of Books review of Robert Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (2021). Among several other things, her lecture addressed how her review was framed and how its length had to be shortened — a point directly related to a substantive objection raised in a letter-to-the-editor by Professor Zaretsky.
