Weil & Other Thinkers
From Italy: Translation as a Metaxù and a Play as an “Evocation” of Simone’s Life — An Interview with Maura Del Serra
The Radical Weil and the Rightist Thibon: A First Set of Thoughts on “Gravity and Grace”
“Between Wittgenstein and Weil: Comparisons in Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics” (excerpt)
Inside Issue 10: New and Forthcoming
From Italy — Liliana Cavani’s Cinema of Fraternitas: An interview about her never-produced movie on the life of Simone Weil
The Waves of Weil Books: 1951-2024 — New and Forthcoming Books
Weilian Lessons from Abroad: Michela Dianetti’s Interview with Gabriella Fiori
Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Political Thinkers in Dialogue
Abstract: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil were two of the most compelling political thinkers of the 20th century who, despite having similar life-experiences, developed radically distinct political philosophies. This unique dialogue between the writings of Arendt and Weil highlights Arendt’s secular humanism, her emphasis on heroic action, and her rejection of the moral approach to politics, contrasted starkly with Weil’s religious approach, her faith in the power of divine Goodness, and her other-centric ethic of suffering and affliction.
The writings here respect the profound differences between Arendt and Weil whilst pulling out the shared preoccupations of power, violence, freedom, resistance, responsibility, attention, aesthetics, and vulnerability. Without shying away from exploring the more difficult concepts in these philosophers’ works, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil also aims to pull out the relevance of their writings for contemporary issues.
- Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Political Thinkers in Dialogue (Bloomsbury Academic, Feb. 22, 2024)
About the editors
- Kathryn Lawson is a Researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She contributes to the online archive project on Simone Weil, Attention, and is the author of several book chapters on continental philosophy, religion and Arendt and Weil.
- Joshua Livingstone is a Researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is author of a forthcoming book chapter on Hannah Arendt.
Related
- Additional references to works on Weil and Arendt can be found here.
Eric Voegelin’s and Simone Weil’s return to Ancient Greece
Summary: Two enigmatic figures of 20th-century political theory, Eric Voegelin and Simone Weil, stand out with idiosyncratic receptions of ancient Greek texts. Both thinkers diagnosed that, as political agents in late modernity, we have unlearned to read world-making ancient texts and their narratives in their cosmic dimension and thus lost what has rooted European culture and history. Against this backdrop, Voegelin and Weil share ‘antidotal’ practises of combining historically and generically distinct material. These practices aim at fathoming a primordial experience at work in European narratives. With this comparative analysis of Voegelin’s and Weil’s symbolic readings (exemplified in this paper by passages from the Iliad, the History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Symposium), Thomas Sojer presents some considerations how their combinatory imagination of ancient material could supply late modern political agents with a pathos, a meaningful self-world relationship that was thought to have gone missing.
- Thomas Sojer, “Eric Voegelin’s and Simone Weil’s return to Ancient Greece,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol 61, no. 1 (May 17, 2022), pp. 87-96.
