“Knowing Totality and Politics in Simone Weil and Albert Camus”
Southeastern Political Review, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 593-610
Recommended
Reflections on War
Politics, pp. 51-56.
Love between Two Poems: The Imagination, Love and Literature in Simone Weil
Mysticism and/as Love Theory (2021), pp. 167-176
From Innate Morality Towards a New Political Ethos: Simone Weil with Carol Gilligan and Judith Butler
In 1943, Simone Weil proposed to supersede the declaration of human rights with a declaration of obligations towards every human being’s balancing pairs of body and soul’s needs, for engaging and inspiring more effectively against autocratic and populist currents in times of crisis. We claim that Weil’s proposal, which remains pertinent today, may have been sidestepped because her notion of needs lacked a fundamental dimension of relationality, prominent in the ‘philosophical anthropology’ underlying the (different) visions for a new political ethos of both Judith Butler and Carol Gilligan. From the radical starting point of innate morality common to all three thinkers, we, therefore, indicate how an enriched notion of interlaced needs, encompassing both balance and relationality, may restore the viability of a declaration of human obligations as a robust source of inspiration. In this combination of balance and relationality, Butler’s notion of aggressive nonviolence is key.
Article in Ethics, Politics & Society. A Journal in Moral and Political Philosophy, no. 4 (2021), pp. 175-188.
Kotva Replies: Thinking through the Middle Voice
The Impersonal and the Other On Simone Weil (1907-43
The European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 183-200
Labor, Collectivity, and the Nurturance of Attentive Belonging
in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 207-226
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.
SIMONE WEIL – La vie au risque de la vérité (SIMONE WEIL – Life at the risk of the truth)
A documentary written and directed by Catherine Deneuve. (in French)
Produced by Grand Lange and KTO / Good projection
Dialectics of Silence for a Time of Crisis: Rethinking the Visionary Insights of Michel Serres and Simone Weil
This paper examines the figure of silence in the works of Michel Serres and Simone Weil. It argues that, in the spirit of Serres and Weil, our time of crisis calls not for a short-term response, but for long-term engagement in a dialectics of silence: the dialogical movement between the silencing of institutions and the attentive silence of visionary insights. Such dialectics can revalidate the value of institutional silencing if based on solid rational proof (rebutting so-called visionary ideas that are baseless) while simultaneously showing the value of visionary ideas that rightfully combat problematic institutional silencing. Especially in this current moment, in which science and scientific propositions are relentlessly questioned, there is a need to lean into silence so as to promote a productive dialogue that regains trust in proven scientific ideas and institutions while allowing visionary insights their place as well, provided that we are willing to test them.
About the author
Marjolein Oele is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco and was trained as an MD at the Free University of Amsterdam. She has a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and received her PhD in philosophy in 2007 from Loyola University Chicago
