Recommended

Simone Weil, une Juive antisémite?

Robert Chenavier read

Abstract: A persistent controversy pursues the memory of Simone Weil about the alleged “anti-Semitism” in some of her writings. It is a fact that, within the framework of the spiritual evolution that led Simone Weil to approach Christianity, she made some harsh remarks on the religion of the Hebrews, since her project was to purge the Christian religion of its Jewish imprint in favor of its Greek component. Can such anti-Hebraism be equated with anti-Semitism? The question continues to surface on a regular basis. Robert Chenavier, who edited the last published volumes of the Works of Simone Weil, methodically takes up the matter, on the basis of his intimate knowledge of the author’s thought, in order to dispel once and for all the fallacies and interpretations that fuel this accusation. He examines, in particular, the text of Simone Weil considered to be the most “anti-Semitic,” which she wrote while in London, this in connection with her work for the Free French. This book will be the definitive work on the subject. {translation adapted from Intelligent Translator app}

Paris: Gallimard (2021)

New Alain Website (in French)

Ronald Collins read

The following content is offered by bythe Friends of Alain Association, founded by his relatives after his death.

Re Alain and Simone Weil — this from the Alain website (Google Translate):

“The general meeting of the association of friends of Alain will be held, as every year in Vésinet, on Saturday June 10th. We will have the pleasure of hearing the best connoisseur of the work of Simone Weil, that is to say Robert Chenavier, on the theme ‘Simone Weil and Alain, inseparable and at odds.'”

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Re Alain & his Propos (also from Alain website)

 “This is an introduction to Alain’s propos, 24 of which are translated here, most of them for the first time in English.

What is a propos ? The French word is both plain and ambiguous: a suggestion, a comment, a proposition, remarks, notes? Perhaps ‘proposal’ comes closest as a translation. With Alain we can be more specific. It’s a short column, drafted on two pages of letter paper, and, at the beginning, published in a local newspaper. From 1906 he wrote them daily and only ceased with the outbreak of war in 1914; he began again in 1921 and continued to 1936, to make a total of around five thousand. At first they were mainly political commentary, but Alain’s philosophy and very wide interests soon entered in. The brevity of the form brought out a vivid, pithy and forceful style, free of jargon, that soon attracted readers and would lead to republication as several books. They are short essays with the freshness of improvisation. As Alain put it, he found that he had a taste for firing arrows at passers-by to get them to look up from their path in life – provocations in short. And, as he wrote later, by not thinking that philosophy was too good for journalism, he invented a genre of journalism – to which I would add: he also invented a genre of philosophy.”

Related

 

“Simone Weil & the Impossible: A Radical View of Religion and Culture”

David Tracy

in David Tracy, Filaments: Theological Profiles, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

The Concept of Mystery and the Value of Philosophy in the Later Wittgenstein

Eric Springsted read

Alasdair MacIntyre has urged a project for philosophers of faith to do philosophy in such a way as to address the deeper human concerns underlying philosophy’s basic questions. This essay examines where Wittgenstein’s later philosophy makes a contribution to that sort of project. It notes the importance of his doctrine of “meaning as use” for thinking philosophically about religion; it is centered in the life-world of religious people. But it also deals with issues arising from Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy should be a sort of conceptual therapy that undoes confusion and leaves everything as it is, i.e., his defactoism. It argues that there is an underlying sense of value. This changes from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. In the latter, he ultimately shows a commitment to a philosophical value of openness and willingness to transform one’s mind by the discovery of what is given.

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 85.4 (Fall, 2011) 547-563.

Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook

Kait Pinder read

This article examines Sheila Watson’s interest in the notoriously difficult thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Watson read Weil’s work in English and French throughout the 1950s, especially during the time she spent in Paris in 1955 and 1956. While critics have examined Watson’s Paris journals for her discussion of modernists such as Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, little attention has been paid to her synthesis of, and response to, Weil’s thought in the same pages. Contextualizing Watson’s revisions to The Double Hook in her sustained reading of Weil, this article argues that Weil’s thought informs Watson’s aesthetic and ethical project in the novel.

The article analyses Watson’s understanding of three central concepts in Weil’s philosophy – decreation, affliction, and metaxu – and offers a Weilian reading of The Double Hook. By resituating Watson as a reader of Weil, the article also highlights the Canadian author’s belonging within a wider circle of women writers in the mid-century who, like Weil and Watson, also demanded unsentimental responses to violence and suffering.

University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 4 (Fall 2021, pp. 669-690.

Thinking about Judaism: Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil (Italian edition) 

Emanuele Pili read

Pensare l’ebraismo: Jacques Maritain e Simone Weil (Italian Edition) Kindle Edition (Feb. 2022), Emanuele Pili, University of Perugia

Abstract in translation

Against the backdrop of the Second World War, Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil reflected deeply on the nature and relevance of Judaism. If Maritain imagined an unprecedented relationship with Christianity, reading the (in) fidelity of Israel in a Pauline way, Weil hoped for a purification of the West from inauthentic cultural traditions, of which Judaism participated in large part, in search of those ties that preserve the ‘human.’

Emanuele Pili originally interprets two very different souls but united by a strong sense of political responsibility, which led to a commitment to fight against totalitarianism. The first Italian translation of the bases for a statute of French minorities appears in the appendix; it is is one of the most controversial texts in the entire body of works by Simone Weil.

 

 

An Endless Seeing

Jacqueline Rose read

Selected Excerpts

from New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 2022), pp. 58-61 (6,286 words)(reviewing Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (U. Chicago Press, 2021)).

[On madness & genius]

“[T]he epithet of ‘madness’ has constantly trailed her, mostly coming from those who could not fathom her, including Charles de Gaulle, who came to know of her through the papers on resistance that she wrote in London in the last year of her life.

And yet it is central to Weil’s unique form of genius that she knew how to identify the threat of incipient madness for the citizens of a world turning insane. A straight line runs through her writing from the insufferable cruelty of modern social arrangements—worker misery, swaths of the world colonized and uprooted by “white races,” force as the violent driver of political will—to the innermost tribulations of the human heart. What would it mean, under the threat of victorious fascism, not to feel that you might go crazy?”

[Image of Justice as a woman]

“She was haunted, she wrote, by the idea of a statue of Justice—a naked woman standing, knees bent from fatigue, hands chained behind her back, leaning toward scales holding two equal weights in its unequal arms, so that it inclined to one side. . . . . As so often in Weil’s writing, it is almost impossible not to read this image as a reference to herself, although her political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence, which she held more or less in steady contempt. She may have been sculpting herself in her dreams, but her template was universal. Justice was for all or for none. . . . ”

“The fact that Justice was a woman was not incidental. According to Simone Petrément, her biographer and one of her closest friends, Weil’s mother told her that killing to prevent a rape was the one exception she made to the commandment against murder. Much later, she took the image of a young girl refusing—with an “upsurge” of her whole being—to be forced into prostitution as the model of a true politics. Antigone and Electra were Weil’s heroines, both belonging to the Greek lineage in which she sourced the cultural values she most cherished in the modern Western world. (She translated central passages from Sophocles’ plays.) Antigone in particular she returned to at the end of her life, for her appeal to an unwritten law that transcends natural rights—which, as she saw it, always sink to the individual claim. The Greeks, she insisted, had no notion of rights: ‘They contented themselves with the name of justice.'”

[Justice as elusive]

“A central question that has vexed so much political thought becomes why justice is always so elusive. Weil’s struggle with this question makes her a psychologist of human power.”

[Mystic and activist]

“A recurring principle in pretty much every stage of her writing from start to finish, the concept of justice renders futile any attempt—though many have tried—to separate Weil the mystic from Weil the activist, or Weil the lover of God from Weil the factory worker, who felt that the only way to understand the wrongs of the modern world was to share the brute indignities of manual labor, which reduced women and men to cogs in the machines they slaved for.”

[turning point in Weil’s thinking]

“If there was a turning point in her thinking, a far better candidate than her mysticism would be her experience at the front during the Spanish Civil War, which is too often dismissed as a bit of a joke because she had to be rescued by her parents when she tripped and immersed her leg in a drum of burning oil, or because, to her credit, as I see it, she was useless at aiming a gun.”

[Creature of analogy]

“By her own account, she is a creature of analogy, starting with perhaps the most vexed of them all—between Hitler and ancient Jerusalem, or Nazism and colonialism. Analogies are deceptive (trompeuses), she wrote in 1939, but they are her ‘sole guide.'”

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— Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.