Simone Weil and René Girard: Violence and the Sacred
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3
Weil & Other Thinkers
René Girard’s Mimetic Desire as Seen in the Writings of Simone Weil
Rene Girard’s expansive comments apropos Simone Weil to a French journalist in 1987 give food for exploring intertwining of themes in the thought of Girard and Weil, whom he considered one of the greatest intellects of her time. I plan to expand those concepts of Weil that he admired: mimetic desire, reciprocal violence, collective victimization, Christ as the Truth, and caritas, while testing their limits, and suggest divergences of thought: on historical progress; disdain for the Old Testament, despite her Jewish ancestry; and the Revelation in respect to non-Christian societies.
In the concept of mimetic desire, Girard applauded Simone Weil’s horror of the “Great Beast” mentality, which she found even in the Church. He praises her insights into Christ’s parable of the adulterous woman for its mimetic group behavior but also for its implied concepts of punishment. The mimetic rivalry that holds primacy in her “The Iliad: A Poem of Force,” impelling the Greeks and the Trojans to destroy each other, had a decisive influence on Girard.
Girard prized Simone Weil’s “theory of the human condition,” illuminated by the Gospels: Christ incarnates the Truth; to pursue the Truth implies always going toward Him. Loving God and loving the order of the world are one, and love of neighbor must govern social decisions. Weil selflessly spent her early activist energies on encouraging marginalized workers to improve their inhuman working conditions. Weil’s concept of decreation has its model in Christ, i.e., He is the innocent, pure, victim, a model of selflessness, free consent to God’s love, and total obedience. In the Bhagavad Gita, Weil found corroboration of her ideas for minimizing violence and its contagion.
The two principal Girard texts for my presentation will be: Violence and the Sacred, and Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre.
E. Jane Doering, “René Girard’s Mimetic Desire as Seen in the Writings of Simone Weil” at Transforming Violence: Cult, Culture, and Acculturation, (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University, 2010).
Educating for Love of Wisdom : John Dewey and Simone Weil
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, PhD
The Moment of a Bird’s Cry: A Note on Wallace Stevens and Simone Weil
The Wallace Stevens Journal, vo. 32, no. 2, pp. 171-180.
The Influence of Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Simone Weil on George Grant’s Changing Understanding of Technology, Grant, G., In Defence of Simone Weil
McMaster University, PhD
Towards a poetics of hope: Simone Weil, Fanny Howe and Alice Walker
University of Wollongong, PhD
God May Strike You Thisaway’ — Flannery O’Connor and Simone Weil on Affliction and Joy
Renascence, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 179-193
Two slices from the same loaf? Weil and Levinas on the demand of social Justice
Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 117-138
Simone Weil’s Finished Platonism
Les Etudes Philosophiques, vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 169-182.
The Ethics of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein
This thesis investigates the ethics of Simone Well and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I claim that, for both Weil and Wittgenstein, ethics is not systematic or propositional: it is a discipline of attentiveness. For Well, this attentiveness is expressed through impartial respect for the needs of others. The self, which exists as a fixed point of view, interferes with the impartiality of the attention, and Weil’s idea of decreation, I argue, is a way of freeing thought from a point of view. I trace the continuity of Wittgenstein’s ethical thinking from his early to late work, and argue that, while he later rejects his Tractarian metaphysics and logical atomism, his reverence for the ineffability of value remains consistent.
University of Victoria, Thesis, 2006
