Spirituality

Decreation and the Ethical Bind

Yoon Sook Cha read

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.

Suffering Divine Things: Simone Weil and Jewish Mysticism

Rico Sneller read

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

Florence de Lussy read

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.

Traces of Resurrection: The Pattern of Simone Weil’s Mysticism

Stuart Jesson read

Abstract: In her “Letter to a Priest,” Simone Weil makes the following, typically bold, assertion concerning belief in the Resurrection: “Hitler could die and return to life again fifty times, but I should still not look upon him as the Son of God. And if the gospel omitted all mention of Christ’s Resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me.”1 This statement has often served as an indication that Weil’s version of Christian mysticism has no place for the Resurrection. Throughout the collection of short essays, articles, and notebooks produced at the end of her life Weil reflects frequently, in profound and intriguing ways, on the significance of death, its effect on human thought, and its place in moral and spiritual life. Not only is death “the source of all untruth and of all truth for men,”2 the crucifixion of Christ becomes the center not only of her spirituality but also of her metaphysics; creation, for Weil, is the cross that crucifies God.3 In some of the more extreme formulations scattered through the notebooks, in particular, Weil gives that impression that she sees life as a cosmic mistake that it is the task of spiritual life to rectify, through acceptance of death: “Birth involves us in the original sin, death redeems us from it.”4 Death is the humiliating destiny of all finite creatures, but if one can refuse the various compulsive ways there are of evading the thought of this, and consent to, or even love this necessity, one thereby participates in the process of “decreation,” the eradication of the autonomous self.

Stuart Jesson, “Traces of Resurrection: The Pattern of Simone Weil’s Mysticism,” in T. Cattoi T. & C.M. Moreman, eds, Death, Dying, and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2015), pp. 49-64.

Effing the Ineffable: The Mysticism of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein

K G M Earl read

Both Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein hold mysticism—i.e., the belief in something utterly transcendent—centrally. The mysticism present in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus presents a problem: if “the mystical” is “deep” nonsense, and there is something important that cannot be sensibly presented in language, we are left in an undesirable situation. The mystical is taken to be of paramount importance but is ultimately inaccessible to reason. Weil, starting with political and theological considerations, arrives at a similar problem. A mystical position yields the “problem of mysticism”: There is the mystical; it is of crucial importance, and it is inaccessible to our reason. Weil’s mystical praxis of decreation is a solution to the problem. This does not present a way that we can come to the mystical, but a way that we can become aware of its revelation, which bypasses our reason.

Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, MA dissertation.

Mystic of Passion and Compassion

Maria Clara Bingemer

Karen M. Kraft, trans., foreword by Tomeu Estelrich, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books