Weil & Other Thinkers

Sacrifice Between West and East: René Girard, Simone Weil and Mahatma Gandhi on Violence and Non-Violence

Wolfgang Palaver read

Wolfgang Palaver In this chapter, Wolfgang Palaver looks at developments in Rene Girard’s later work, in particular, at Girard’s assessment that he had earlier unfairly “scapegoated” sacrifice in an effort to rid humanity of violence. In recognition of the need to address — not erase — the violence that is with us, Girard developed his thinking in at least two ways. The first is his growing interest in how an “ontology of peace,” which Girard held undergirds all faith traditions, is expressed in non-Christian faiths. Second is his insight that Jesus’s death on the cross tells us not only about the evils of sacrifice-as-murder but also about the productive possibilities of sacrifice-of-self, giving for the sake of others. To explore what such donative sacrifice consists in, Palaver investigates the theories of oppression, resistance, and sacrifice in the works of Simone Weil and Mahatma Gandhi.

in in Marcia Pally, ed., Mimesis and Sacrifice Applying Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines, Bloomsbury (2019), pp. 37-50

‘The question in each and every thing’: Nietzsche and Weil on affirmation

Stuart Jesson read

Abstract: This paper identifies and offers commentary upon a previously un-remarked consonance between Nietzsche and Weil when it comes to the idea of a universal love of the world (‘affirmation’ in Nietzsche’s terms, or ‘consent to necessity’ in Weil’s). The discussion focuses on five features of the Nietzschean account of affirmation, which are as follows: 1) that the possibility of affirmation has the form of a fundamental question at the heart of human life, which (2) has an all-or-nothing character (it is universal in scope and pervasive in influence); that (3) genuine affirmation is rare, difficult or traumatic in an existentially revealing way, primarily because (4) affirmation means facing up to the lack of finality in the world and in particular the problem of meaningless suffering, which means that (5) affirmation is tied up with a fundamental revaluation. The first half of the paper outlines the parallels between Nietzschean affirmation and Weilian ‘consent to necessity’ in relation to the first three of these, which are also the most general. The second half of the paper explores the fourth and fifth, so as to suggest a way of reading the underlying similarity between these two projects: both are attempts to rediscover the possibility of an all-embracing affirmation of reality in the absence of any existential teleology, and when eschatology has been presumed to be impossible. In other words, both Nietzsche and Weil are compelled to find a way of achieving a transfigured perspective on ‘the whole’ in the absence of any transformation of ‘the whole’.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 86, no.2 (2019) pp. 131-155.

The experience and the idea of war in the writings of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras

Tristana Dini read

This article considers the works of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras as witnesses and narrators of the events of the Second World War. Their two perspectives offer a first, original reflection by women intellectuals on war and violence based on direct involvement. Simone Weil construed her idea of ‘force’ from her first-hand experience of the Spanish Civil War and her participation in the French Resistance, in London. Marguerite Duras offered her personal testimony of war violence (in the French Resistance, in France) intertwining fiction and reality, wavering together autobiography and invention. Duras, in the contrary, tried to represent the unrepresentable by connecting her personal to a collective trauma.

European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire , vol. 25, no. 5 (2018), pp. 818-830

Simone Weil, a politics of the good for our age

(Conference) watch

Simone Weil (1909-1943) – philosopher, teacher in high schools and for factory workers, social activist, anarchistic-ranks soldier in Spain, manual worker in factories and farms, Résistence member, mystic – never wrote academic articles: the 16 volumes of her writings are an intellectual but personal expression of her social, political and spiritual deliberations and engagement, constituting a corpus of original, sober and subversive thought. Her influence is intensifying along the years, from Albert Camus who first published her posthumously and described her as “the only great spirit of our time”, up to her increasing presence in the words of contemporary politicians. A first Hebrew translation of a collection from her social and political writings is forthcoming in 2018, and in 30-31.10.2018 an international conference will be held at the Open University of Israel campus in Raanana on her thought and its relevance for the society and politics of our age from theoretical, comparative and historical perspectives. The conference will be tri-lingual, in Hebrew, French and English, with simultaneous translation between Hebrew and French.

Participants: Barbara Wolfer, Aviad Heifetz, Frederic Worms, Alexandra Feret, Jean Davienne, E. Jane Doering, Daniel Rosenberg, Pascal David, Denis Charbit, Robert Chenavier, Rita Fulco, and Christine Evans

Open University of Israel campus (Raanana) (2018)

Against History: A Lesson from Simone Weil

Palle Yourgrau read

Excerpt

“At the heart of Weil’s argument against history resides a lesson she tried over and over again to teach those who would listen, a lesson we today need specially to heed. The lesson concerns the fundamental question of whether the meaning of the world, as one might put it, or its value, or its significance, can be found within it. That it can is the message of so-called humanism, a child of The Enlightenment, the view that the key to our destiny lies within us. Call that view immanentism, in contrast with transcendentalism, or if you prefer, the horizontal vs the vertical perspective, or, perhaps most perspicuously, naturalism vs. supernaturalism. On this question, one cannot avoid taking sides.”

iai News, July 18, 2017

Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

Deborah Nelson read

This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches.

Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere “school of the unsentimental” offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2017)

Hungry for Beauty: Simone Weil’s Inversion of Kant’s Aesthetics

Lyra Koli read

This master’s dissertation argues that Simone Weil’s aesthetics can be seen as an inversion of Immanuel Kant’s, concerning the relation between natural dependency and beauty. Kant’s notions of beauty and sublimity are shown to be founded on overcoming hunger and fear, and the relevance of the immortality postulate for the Critique of the Power of Judgment is demonstrated. Following Angelica Nuzzo’s Ideal Embodiment, Kant’s aesthetics is understood as describing a transcendental embodiment, where the feeling of life is an experience of the “humanity” of man. This “humanity” is argued as exclusionary in that it rests on an overcoming of hunger and fear. Furthermore, his notions of finality without an end and disinterested pleasure are described as reinforcing the view of man’s superiority to the rest of nature. The extensive Kantian influences on Weil’s aesthetics often claimed to be mainly Platonically inspired, are presented. Through a critical examination of beauty and eating in her life and work, the common idea of her aesthetics as one of ascetic renunciation is disputed. Instead, her aesthetics is found to be a radical materialist reinterpretation of some of Kant’s central notions, particularly finality without an end and disinterested pleasure, where hunger, fear and suffering remain present. An examination of the metaphors of eating used by Weil to describe beauty illustrates how her aesthetics reverses the relation between man and his natural dependency: instead of an immortal moral humanity, free from hunger and fear, the center of her aesthetics is the very mortal muddle Kant ostensibly overcame. For Weil, beauty is not an outline for man’s superiority; instead, it makes it possible for us to love the fact that we are not all, but part of the world of eating and being eaten.

Philosophy: Aesthetics and Art Theory: Kingston University, London.

“Saints, Scandals, and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini”

Lisabeth During

PhilPapers, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 16-32