The Critical Spirit: The Pessimistic Heterodoxy of Simone Weil
PhD, New School for Social Research
Spirituality
Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us
Laurie Gagne, ed., Plough Publishing House
Book Review: Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings
Reviewing Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, Eric Springsted ed, trans by Springsted & Lawrence E. Schmidt, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 3 (July 4, 2017)
Concerning the Our Father
Reprinted in Catholic Attention, Jan. 25, 2017
A Secular Mysticism? Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and the Idea of Attention
M. del Carmen Paredes, ed., Filosofía, arte y mística, Salamanca, Spain: Salamanca University Press (2017).
Decreation and the Ethical Bind
In Simone Weil’s philosophical and literary work, obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: the other’s self-affirmation and one’s own dislocation; what one has and what one has to give; a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand implied by asking nothing. The other’s claims upon the self―which induce unfinished obligation, unmet sleep, hunger―drive the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality at the heart of this book.
Decreation and the Ethical Bind is a study in decreative ethics in which self-dispossession conditions responsiveness to a demand to preserve the other from harm. In examining themes of obligation, vulnerability, and the force of weak speech that run from Levinas to Butler, the book situates Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech articulate ethical appeal and the vexations of response. It elaborates a form of ethics that is not grounded in subjective agency and narrative coherence but one that is inscribed at the site of the self’s depersonalization.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2020
Yoon Sook Cha received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.
From Gravity to Grace: Finding a Redemptive Voice Among Displaced Christians in Europe
Middlesex University, PhD
The Idea of the Absence of God in Simone Weil
McMaster University, PhD
Suffering Divine Things: Simone Weil and Jewish Mysticism
To what extent can man suffer God? The verb ‘suffering’ as such is ambiguous, for it can either mean bearing ‘pain’ (‘to suffer from’), or tolerating something. In other words, ‘suffering’ can be both intransitive and transitive. Whereas the first meaning seems to be predominantly passive, the second, while still fairly passive, is more active. In both cases, however, a kind of interpenetration of both ‘parties’ is implied: that which I am suffering is somehow inside me, whether I want it or not. Anyhow, the question, ‘can man suffer God?’, turns out to be in need of clarification before it can be answered at all.
In this contribution, I will study a Jewish author who ‘exchanged’ her Judaism for Christianity: Simone Weil (1909-1943). I will try to see what she writes about suffering God, it being my hypothesis that suffering God is a more adequate notion than the vaguer ‘experiencing’ God. Suffering God, or rather, suffering divine things might be a notion accounting for the conflation of ethical, spiritual, and global dimensions. I will try to shed some light on Simone Weil’s views by relating them to some motives from the Jewish mystical tradition: ‘cosmoeroticism’, kawanna and tsimtsum.
Mahmoud Masaeli, ed., Spirituality and Global Ethics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2017), pp. 9-26
A Strange Christian: Simone Weil
This article appears in Katherine Davies & Toby Garfitt, eds., God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid–Twentieth Century, New York: Fordham University Press (2015), pp. 69-87.
Florence de Lussy is the honorary general curator in the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France and has devoted 27 years to editing The Complete Works of Simone Weil.
God’s Mirror presents perspectives on intellectual, cultural, and political questions faced by French and French-Canadian intellectuals who engaged with Catholicism in the period 1930-50, in the diverse but related fields of philosophy, theology, politics, literature, and music. Names include Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Paul Valéry, Simone Weil, and many others.
