Recommended

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

“Kaija Saariaho in conversation at the Royal Swedish Opera – ‘As a child, I always imagined music’,”

Kaija Saariaho with Katarina Aronsson watch

Operavision, (interview turns to Simone Weil at 22:07)

Weaving the World: Simone Weil on Science, Mathematics, and Love

Vance Morgan read

Weaving the World uses Simone Weil’s philosophy of science and mathematics as an introduction to the thought of one of the most powerful philosophical and theological minds of the twentieth century. Weil held that, for the ancient Greeks, the ultimate purpose of science and mathematics was the knowledge and love of the divine. Her creative assimilation of this vision led her to a conception of science and mathematics that connects the human person with not only the physical world but also the spiritual and aesthetic aspects of human existence. Vance G. Morgan investigates Weil’s earliest texts on science, in which she lays the foundation for a conception of science rooted in basic human concerns and activities. He then tracks Weil’s analysis of the development of science, particularly of the mathematics and science of the ancient Greeks.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005

“Decreation as Destruction or as Creation?”

Kathryn Lawson watch

The ethical implications of Simone Weil’s “decreation” are perhaps the most controversial of her work and it is difficult to determine if she is asserting a violent destruction of the human body or a creation of the human spirit as linked with God. Rowan Williams claims that Weil’s decreation requires the “I” to dissolve completely and thus collapses the site of ethics but Yoon Sook Cha argues that the ethical site opened in Weil is not the “I” but the “in-between”. I will suggest that decreation holds both destruction/ death and creation/ life open in order to enter a radical shift in perspective from dualistic to relational through the creation of a bridge between the I and God.

Kathryn Lawson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

ONLINE CLASS: “Simone Weil: Secular Saint” (Nov. 2022)

Frank Ambrosio read

Lecture-Based with Discussion (hosted by Politics  & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.)

Simone Weil lived between 1909 and 1943, her short life bracketed by the First and Second World Wars and shaped by the political and economic upheavals that came between.  She registered the anguish of her time with exquisite sensitivity and felt called in the face of this suffering to rethink her collapsing civilization to its roots.  In the 1930s, she was active on the political left, involving herself in trade union politics worker education and the Spanish Civil War.  Albert Camus called her essays of this period “the most penetrating and prophetic contributions to Western social and political thought since Marx.”  Then, in her last years, a mystical spiritual perspective unexpectedly opened to her, and she came, she said, “to know the love of God as intimately as the smile of a friend.” Despite her personal devotion to the Christian Gospel, however, she refused baptism into the Christian Church just as firmly as she refused to identify herself with the Judaism of her family heritage. She died alone in a British sanitorium where she was being treated for tuberculosis at age 34, defying the orders of her doctors to eat a heathy diet on the grounds that she would take no more than her compatriots in the French Resistance had available to them.

Genuine originality is almost unimaginable today in the moral, political and religious dimensions of our lives and societies. We rightly sense that were it to appear, it would be strange and deeply disturbing. This is the importance and fascination of Simone Weil. She puts a human face on the suffering of those who are starving for justice, for truth, for human dignity and love – in other words, all of us – and challenges us to allow our attention to dwell on what is all around us, yet remains unseen.

In his highly acclaimed biographical study of Simone Weil, Robert Coles, distinguished professor of Psychiatry and Pulitzer Prize winner, characterizes her as a brilliant and effective person whose life and death are most remarkable for the paradoxes with which they confront and challenge each of us as human beings. Through a close reading of several her best-known essays, this course will attempt to bring those paradoxes into clear relief as a focus for personal reflection.

  • Six Thursdays: November 3, 10, 17, (no class 11/24- Thanksgiving), and December 1, 8, 15, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. EST Online

Cost

  • $170.00 per person

Required books:

  • Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sian Miles, 9780802137296
  • Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, by Robert Coles, 9781683362975

Frank Ambrosio is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. After studying Italian language and literature in Florence, Italy, he completed his doctoral degree at Fordham University with a specialization in contemporary European Philosophy. He is the founding Director, with Edward Maloney, of the Georgetown University “My Dante Project” a web-based platform for personal and collaborative study of Dante’s Commedia. In 2014, he acted as lead instructor for the launch of an ongoing web-based course (MOOC) on Dante offered by EDX which currently has been utilized by over 20,000 students. He is the author of Dante and Derrida: Face to Face, (State University of New York Press, 2012).

He has received five separate awards from Georgetown University for excellence in teaching. He is the former Director of the Doctor of Liberal Studies Program, and in 2015, he received the Award for Faculty Achievement from the American Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs. In October 2009, The Teaching Company released his course, “Philosophy, Religion and the Meaning of Life,” a series of 36 half-hour video lectures which he created for the “Great Courses” series. At Georgetown, he teaches courses on Existentialism, Postmodernism, Hermeneutics, and Dante.

In addition to his work at Georgetown, he co-directs The Renaissance Company with Deborah R. Warin, leading adult study programs focusing on Italian Renaissance culture and its contemporary heritage.

“Simone Weil’s Religious Thought in the Light of Catholic Theology”

G. Frenaud

Theological Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 349—376