This essay in both literary criticism and negative theology treats three widely diverse cases of women who “had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring.” The three cases are of the poet Sappho, the mystic Margarite Porete, and the philosopher Simone Weil. Each of them underwent “an experience of decreation, or so she tells us.” Decreation, which is Simone Weil’s coinage, is here defined as “an undoing of the creature in us—that creature enclosed in self (...) and defined by self. But to undo self one must move through self to the very inside of its definition.” The audacious, unconventional spirituality of these women led society to “pass judgments on the authenticity” of their “ways of being.” Weil has been termed “neurotic, anorectic, pathological, sexually repressed or fake” by many readers of both her work and the biographies written about her. Marguerite Porete was condemned at trial for being not only a heretic but also a pseudo-mulier—a “fake woman”—while “Sappho’s ancient biographers tried to discredit her seriousness by assuring us she lived a life of unrestrained and incoherent sexual indulgence.” These women, however, “know what love is,” namely “the touchstone of a true or a false spirituality,” and each of them finds a means of “telling God.”. (shrink)

A close reading of Simone Weil's philosophical and literary writings examining themes of ethical obligation, dispossession and vulnerability in relation to the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler.

This essay thinks through Nanguo Ziqi’s famous “I lost myself” (wu sang wo 吾喪我) remark in the Qiwulun 齊物論 in light of Weil’s notion of decreation. The desire to undo the self is paradoxical, and most philosophical interpretations of the Zhuangzi passage try to avoid the paradox of “I lost myself” by positing various levels of self. Weil’s decreation embraces the paradox, and thereby helps clarify how Nanguo’s “I lost myself” connects with his subsequent metaphor of pipes of (...) Heaven. More broadly, this essay is a first step in drawing together these two uniquely unsystematic and paradoxical thinkers. (shrink)

Jan Zwicky suggests that Lyric Philosophy may be read as a “letter to a revered parent—with whom I have quarrelled, but by whom I still wish to be understood.” Though the “parent” thinker to whom she refers is Freud, Zwicky’s conversation with Simone Weil in Wisdom & Metaphor addresses Weil as a “foremother” in the act of making “herself clear to herself.” This paper examines Weil’s role in Wisdom & Metaphor and considers Weil as an influence in Zwicky’s poetry, reading (...) “relinquishing” in Zwicky’s poetry and “decreation” in Weil’s philosophy as metaphors that resonate and debate with each other. (shrink)

What might it mean to engage in an educative struggle with death? Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich helps us to answer that question. Tolstoy’s story depicts the life of a man who, when suddenly faced with the prospect of his own death, is at first unable to comprehend the reality of his situation. He is angry, fearful, and disgusted. As he gradually comes to terms with his mortality, he undergoes a harrowing process of transformation, at the heart of (...) which lies the development of his capacity for attention. Drawing on ideas from the French philosopher and pedagogue Simone Weil, it is argued that Ivan’s experience is consistent with the passage from ‘gravity’, through the void of intense suffering, toward a state of grace. (shrink)

This article aims to examine the mystical meanings of food in the texts Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, and First and Last Notebooks by the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). The main questions posed over the course of this study are as follows: How does Weil interpret food in her mystical texts? What relationship do her ideas have with her context of the Second World War, with Judaism, with her body? Are biomedical understandings of behavior, such as anorexia nervosa, (...) applicable to Weil? The methodology will involve an in-depth reading of the three texts mentioned above, sketching the key theories of decreation and affliction. The main thesis of the paper is that food has an irremediably ambiguous status in Weil, marking both the degrading subjection of the human being to the earthly laws of necessity and gravity, and paradoxically, a path to salvation, where, through the spiritual transformation of decreation, the human being eats and is eaten by God. The author argues that this quasi-Christian mysticism must first be understood in Weil’s context of the Second World War, and that it also involves a problematic relationship with Judaism. Moreover, this study contends that interpretations utilizing primarily medical frameworks to understand Weil's food deprivation, such as anorexia nervosa, are insufficient. Such pathologization, as will be demonstrated, neglects the complex and often ambiguous mystical, ethical, and ontological meanings that Weil locates in hunger. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis piece explores the dialogic form as a way to engage in rigorously focused philosophical analysis and the generation of problems. We take up Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the relation of aesthetics and politics, and his critique of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetic thought in its purported inability to generate political community. To develop the stakes of this problem, we introduce Simone Weil’s concept of decreation as a possible bridge between the deformative capacity of aesthetics emphasized by Deleuze, and the politically (...) constitutive aesthetics demanded by Rancière. To see the efficacy of the relation between the concepts of deformation, decreation, and political community, we explore the history of the problem of figuration in art and the problem of collective constitution in politics. We conclude that a process of deformation and decreation is an essential feature of political becoming which does not preclude the development of community; undoing the self, to the contrary, activates wider possibilities for relating to the human and non-human world. (shrink)

Tracing the thread of “decreation” in Chinese thought, from constantly changing classical masterpieces to fake cell phones that are better than the original. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that means “fake,” originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals. Shanzhai has since spread into other parts of Chinese life, with shanzhai books, shanzhai politicians, (...) shanzhai stars. There is a shanzhai Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, in which Harry takes on his nemesis Yandomort. In the West, this would be seen as piracy, or even desecration, but in Chinese culture, originals are continually transformed—deconstructed. In this volume in the Untimely Meditations series, Byung-Chul Han traces the thread of deconstruction, or “decreation,” in Chinese thought, from ancient masterpieces that invite inscription and transcription to Maoism—“a kind a shanzhai Marxism,” Han writes. Han discusses the Chinese concepts of quan, or law, which literally means the weight that slides back and forth on a scale, radically different from Western notions of absoluteness; zhen ji, or original, determined not by an act of creation but by unending process; xian zhan, or seals of leisure, affixed by collectors and part of the picture's composition; fuzhi, or copy, a replica of equal value to the original; and shanzhai. The Far East, Han writes, is not familiar with such “pre-deconstructive” factors as original or identity. Far Eastern thought begins with deconstruction. (shrink)

Reality and contradiction -- The paradox of desire -- God and the world -- Necessity and obedience -- Grace and decreation -- Conclusion : Weil's theological coherence.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance and (...) representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)

Resumo Neste artigo, pretendemos abordar o pensamento de duas mulheres por meio dos conceitos de aniquilamento, que encontramos em Le mirouer des simples ames de Marguerite Porete, e descriação que aparece em Pensateur et grace de Simone Weil. Também usaremos a obra de Weil La connaisance surnaturelle composta pelos Cahiers d’Amérique e Notes ècrites à Londres, onde ela faz referência ao livro de Marguerite Porete. Deste modo, apresentaremos, num primeiro momento, a mística de Marguerite Porete, focando no conceito de aniquilamento. (...) Depois, num segundo momento, mostraremos um pouco da mística de Simone Weil por meio do conceito de descriação. A partir deste segundo momento, já iremos traçando alguns paralelos para mostrar a semelhança entre a mística das duas pensadoras que se refletirá no terceiro momento deste artigo, onde apresentaremos Weil como leitura de Le mirouer des simples ames.In this article we intend to approach the thought of two French philosophers through two concepts: annihilation, found in the Le mirouer des simples ames of Marguerite Porete, and decreation, which appears in the Pensateur et grace of Simone Weil. We will also refer to Weil’s La connaisance surnaturelle, composed of the Cahiers d’Amérique and Notes ècrites à Londres, where she refers to Marguerite Porete’s book. First we present the mysticism of Marguerite Porete, focusing on the concept of annihilation. Next we discuss the mysticism of Simone Weil through the concept of decreation. We then draw some parallels to show the similarity between the mysticism of the two thinkers, and discuss Weil as a reader of Le mirouer des simples ames. (shrink)

This paper argues that the influential French thinker, Simone Weil, has something distinctive and important to offer educational and ethical inquiry. Weil’s ethical theory is considered against the backdrop of her life and work, and in relation to her broader ontological, epistemological and political position. Pivotal concepts in Weil’s philosophy – gravity, decreation and grace – are discussed, and the educational implications of her ideas are explored. The significance of Weil’s thought for educationists lies in the unique emphasis she (...) places on the development of attention, a notion elaborated here via the key themes of truth, beauty and love. (shrink)

Au renouveau indéniable de la théologie de la création, ne semble pas correspondre, dans l’expérience d’un bon nombre de chrétiens de notre temps, un intérêt égal pour l’affirmation de la création du monde ou de Dieu créateur. Comment expliquer cette disparité ? La croyance à la création revêt deux formes, l’une faible, celle du théisme, l’autre forte, celle de la foi scripturaire liée à l’Alliance, et il semble que la seconde cherche à assumer la première comme une voie sapientielle de (...) portée universelle ; mais la foi de nombreux chrétiens ne paraît même pas impliquer cette croyance faible. Cet oubli appauvrit sans doute leur foi, mais peut s’expliquer : la sécularisation a produit un effacement de la notion de création, qui a perdu son évidence culturelle, la question de l’origine est laissée à la science, le croyant trouve Dieu dans la proximité du présent et ne le cherche plus dans l’espace originaire, et des attitudes croyantes, autrefois liées à cette notion, s’expriment aujourd’hui autrement sans altération de la foi. La théologie aurait avantage à analyser le lien de la création à la culture, et à expliciter le rôle qu’y joue l’Esprit Saint dans une perspective mystique d’anéantissement ou de « décréation ».Despite an undeniable renewal of creation theology, a good number of contemporaneous Christians do not seem to have the same interest in affirming the world’s creation or a God creator. How can this disparity be explained ? Belief in creation takes on two forms : a weak one of theism and a strong one of scriptural faith tied to the Covenant. It seems that the second tries to assume the first as a sapiential way with universal import. The faith of numerous Christians, however, does not seem to even imply this weak belief. Without doubt, this omission impoverishes their faith but can be explained : secularization wiped out the idea of creation when it lost its cultural importance. The question of origins is left to science, ; the believer finds God in the proximity of the present and no longer looks for the original space. It is also true that believing attitudes, which were tied to this notion in the past, express themselves today in another way, without changing the faith. Theology would be better off if it analysed the connection of creation to culture and make explicit the role that the Holy Spirit plays in the mystical perspective of annihilation or of “de-creation”. (shrink)

This study juxtaposes Simone Weil's exposition of God's invitation to know and love the good through the divine signature of beauty stamped on the order of the world and Flannery O'Connor's depiction of a society whose oppressive order allows some characters to oppose outright a divine order or to live under the illusion that the divine invitation is irrelevant because they, in their egoism and materialist values, are the centre of the universe. An examination of O'Connor's and Weil's ideas on (...) order and beauty, grace and decreation, within the disorders of their contexts, reveals both writers' skills in pointing prophetically through disorder to divine order, thus, disclosing bridges of revelation. (shrink)

How can we articulate the intimate demand of the spiritual life and the struggle for solidarity? These two issues have often been treated separately; in _Simone Weil: Attention to the Real_, however, Robert Chenavier explores the work of Simone Weil and demonstrates how she brought them together in a single movement of thought. "Our time has a unique mission, calling for the creation of a civilization based on the spirituality of work," she wrote near the end of her short life. (...) Her experience as a militant and the call of the divine nurtured in her writing an intense and unwavering defense of this new civilization, backed by her personal sense of intellectual, moral, and political responsibility. Originally published in French in 2009, _Simone Weil: __Attention to the Real_ leads the reader through her earliest writing as a perceptive social critic to her work on spirituality and materialism, and finally to her extraordinary concept of decreation, produced before her death at the age of thirty-four. "To an exceptional degree," Chenavier says, "the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment, and her reflection form one single whole." Chenavier argues that Weil's vocation took on a very original form in the history of philosophical thought. He is especially concerned with Weil's philosophical writings on the concept of work, which remain relevant today, and which provide an important key to her thinking throughout her life. Bernard Doering's superb translation brings to English readers Chenavier's succinct account of Simone Weil's life and an illuminating introduction to her philosophical thought. "Bernard Doering has crafted a very fine translation of Robert Chenavier's comprehensive but brief introduction to Simone Weil's philosophical project. It provides an excellent English introduction to the social philosophy of Simone Weil, with due attention to her understanding of the importance of work in learning to attend to the real. Doering's translation will be of interest to both a religious and secular readership, both inside and outside the academy." —_Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto_. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” advances the claim that, for the first time in history, the “function” of the work of art is political, as evidenced by cinema. For Benjamin, film is the “first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility” and Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary Benjaminian philosopher, further elucidates this “function,” positing that cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics, not solely with aesthetics, and, (...) consequently, is proximate to philosophy itself. Whereas Deleuze’s Cinema books posed cinema as enacting time in a pure state, Agamben, in his “Notes on Gesture,” breaches from Deleuze’s spatial and cartographic theory of cinema, drawing on Guy Debord’s “détournement via montage,” Simone Weil’s “decreation” and, perhaps most implicitly, from Benjamin. Agamben’s political theory of cinema, motivated by cinema’s “stoppage and repetition of time,” is directly informed by Benjamin’s: “optical unconscious,” appropriation of Brecht’s “social Gestus,” and the relationship between technological reproducibility and aura. Agamben’s “gesture” fastens cinema’s aesthetics not only to ethics and politics, but to the “ontological consistency of human experience,” or to a way of being. (shrink)

Admirers of Robert Bresson often remark on the commitments he shares with the philosopher and activist Simone Weil. Both stubbornly idiosyncratic, they subscribe to what modernists call “a poetics of impersonality”: a deep desire to shed the ego and find some space empty of will, intention and even consciousness. Bresson pursued this ideal through his anti-theatrical practice, his resistance to expression and interpretation, and his war against “acting.” In Weil's religious thinking, the possibility of achieving a state of automatism in (...) the soul, and thus leaving room for God to occupy all, was central. “Decreation,” her term for this principle, sounds like a will to suicide (a recurring theme in Bresson) but she explains it as motivated by love. Bresson's writerly films – the Bernanos adaptations (especially Diary of a Country Priest) – and Au hasard Balthazar – take as their theme the problem of grace. As in Weil, the path to grace goes through an acceptance of brutal necessity and incomprehensible accident. This is also the conclusion of Rossellini's Europa ’51. While André Bazin is a thinker with a keen sensitivity to grace and spiritual accident – his interest in depth of field is motivated by a desire to keep the free exercise of chance in play – his notion of love is more compassionate than anything we meet in Weil, Bresson or Rossellini. As Truffaut remarked, Bazin is a Christian from the days before the Fall. (shrink)

The article examines the role of the Last Judgment in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. It argues that the central ontological structure of Agamben’s early thought is that of the perpetually occurring origin. The figure of the perpetual final judgment captures precisely this ontological structure. In order to explicate this figure, the article examines Agamben’s relation to the Heideggerian project of the “destruction of judgment” in two steps. First, it examines the way Agamben turns the methodology of “destruction” into the project of (...) “decreation.” Second, it examines the Agambenian critique of judgment in terms of the perpetually occurring Last Judgment. The essay concludes with a brief examination of the Homo Sacer project and argues that “bare life” should be understood as life lived under this perpetual final judgment. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the ethical responsibility of the face-to-face relation offers an illuminating context or clearing within which we might better appreciate the work of Simone Weil. Levinas’s subjectivity of the hostage, the one who is responsible for the other before being responsible for the self, provides us with a way of re-encountering the categories of gravity and grace invoked in Weil’s original account. In this paper I explore the terrain between these thinkers by raising the question of eating (...) as, in part, an ethical act. Weil’s conception of grace refers to the state of decreation in which the utter humility of the self moves toward a kind of disintegration and weightlessness. This weightlessness, which Weil contrasts to the gravity of terrestrial weight, might be thought of in terms of the subject’s fundamental responsibility for the other, especially in terms of the injunction “Thou shalt neither kill nor take the food of thy neighbour.” Taking the place of the other, taking the food from the mouth of the other, is the ethical dilemma facing the subject as hostage and an elaboration of this situation may provide us with steps toward a radical questioning of anorexia as—at least inpart—an ethical rather than purely medical condition. (shrink)

How can we articulate the intimate demand of the spiritual life and the struggle for solidarity? These two issues have often been treated separately; in Simone Weil: Attention to the Real, however, Robert Chenavier explores the work of Simone Weil and demonstrates how she brought them together in a single movement of thought. "Our time has a unique mission, calling for the creation of a civilization based on the spirituality of work," she wrote near the end of her short life. (...) Her experience as a militant and the call of the divine nurtured in her writing an intense and unwavering defense of this new civilization, backed by her personal sense of intellectual, moral, and political responsibility. Originally published in French in 2009, Simone Weil: Attention to the Real leads the reader through her earliest writing as a perceptive social critic to her work on spirituality and materialism, and finally to her extraordinary concept of decreation, produced before her death at the age of thirty-four. "To an exceptional degree," Chenavier says, "the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment, and her reflection form one single whole." Chenavier argues that Weil's vocation took on a very original form in the history of philosophical thought. He is especially concerned with Weil's philosophical writings on the concept of work, which remain relevant today, and which provide an important key to her thinking throughout her life. Bernard Doering's superb translation brings to English readers Chenavier's succinct account of Simone Weil's life and an illuminating introduction to her philosophical thought. "Bernard Doering has crafted a very fine translation of Robert Chenavier's comprehensive but brief introduction to Simone Weil's philosophical project. It provides an excellent English introduction to the social philosophy of Simone Weil, with due attention to her understanding of the importance of work in learning to attend to the real. Doering's translation will be of interest to both a religious and secular readership, both inside and outside the academy." --Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto "This is an excellent introduction to the thought of Simone Weil. Chenavier understands Weil as a philosopher and in one hundred pages is able to give a succinct presentation of her, from her earliest writings to her extraordinary later ones. This sophisticated presentation can serve both as an introduction to Weil for the nonspecialist and as an introduction to Chenavier's own take on Weil for the reader who knows Weil and is interested in Chenavier's contribution." --Eric O. Springsted, president, American Weil Society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Horizons of Grace:Marilynne Robinson and Simone WeilKaty RyanThe sorrow is that every soul is put out of house.Marilynne Robinson1All of us, even the youngest, are in a situation like Socrates' when he was awaiting death in prison and learning to play the lyre.Simone Weil2Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping (1980) is a meditative and lyrical reflection on old themes: abandonment, loss, grief, renewal, hope, memory—what the narrator Ruth Stone calls (...) the "sad and outcast state of revelation" (p. 184). The novel returns in its opening pages to the suicide of Ruth's mother, Helen, and concludes with a bridge crossing, misinterpreted by other characters as intentional death. Critical responses to the novel usefully explore its nineteenth-century American literary impulses (Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville), its reworking of female subjectivity, its quiet insistence on the transience of all things and the unmaking of boundaries.3 Words on suicide are scarce. In this inattention, critics may be following the lead of the novel, which, among novels containing acts of self-destruction,is exceptional in its almost total reticence on the subject. Not one character asks why Helen kills herself, and little emerges from the narrative to shed light on the unasked question.Structurally, the function of the mother's suicide seems obvious. Helen's death creates two orphans—that preferred status in literature that frees characters up for adventure and self-discovery. It also appears to be the cause, or at least a leading cause, of Ruth's sadness. Ruth's aunt Sylvie assumes this to be true. After the deaths of their mother and [End Page 349] grandmother, Ruth and her sister Lucille are passed off by their overwhelmed great aunts to Sylvie, a woman who has been wandering the country, hopping trains, getting by. When the concerned women in the town of Fingerbone attempt to determine how best to keep Ruth from following in Sylvie's uncivil footsteps, to keep her "safely within doors" one of them remarks on how sad Ruth always looks.And Sylvie replied, "Well, she is sad." Silence. Sylvie said, "She should be sad." She laughed. "I don't mean she should be, but, you know, who wouldn't be?" Again, silence.(p. 185)The unsaid is met with repeated silence. Sylvie proposes that anyone who had survived what Ruth has survived, understood to be her mother's death, would be sad, should be sad. A long silence also greets Sylvie's discomforting observation that Ruth is "'like another sister to me. She's her mother all over again'" (p. 182).The generating absence of the mother sets the stage for Ruth's spiritual exile and eventual communion, the moment when a "word so true" comes home to her. Ruth does not, in fact, become "her mother all over again."Born of people falling to their deaths (Ruth's mother and grandfather), Housekeeping ends with a counter-image, an image of crossing over a bridge (horizontality) rather than falling from it (verticality). One way to think about the philosophical movement in the novel is provided by Simone Weil's writing, which relies of tropes of gravity. I am particularly interested in connections between Housekeeping and Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace (1952) and Waiting for God (1992). These texts explore the nature of suffering by focusing on the inevitability of waiting, the practice of attention, and the necessity of detachment.Although Weil wrote movingly and persuasively about industrial labor, war, and other forms of political oppression, here I emphasize her spiritual writings. In his introduction to First and Last Notebooks, Richard Rees writes of Weil, "One may say that two of her chief preoccupations were, first, how to organize a society so that suffering should be reduced to a minimum, and, second, how to ensure that the (large) irreducible minimum should not be valueless" (p. viii). Housekeeping dramatizes this second concern. The novel also provides a needed fictional example of decreation, Weil's difficult name for the [End Page 350] process by which something created can be transformed into something uncreated, or "the act of allowing moments empty of meaning to remain 'unfilled.'"4 The suicide... (shrink)

Remembering forgetting : Maladies de la Mémoire in nineteenth-century France -- Dying of the past : medical studies of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France -- Hysterical remembering -- Trauma, representation, and historical consciousness -- Trauma : a dystopia of the spirit -- Falling into history : Freud's case of 'Frau Emmy von N.' -- Why Freud haunts us -- Why Warburg now? -- Classic postmodernism : Keith Jenkins -- Ebb tide : Frank Ankersmit -- The art of losing oneself : Anne (...) Carson and decreation -- Inquiry as hope : Richard Rorty -- Photographic ambivalence -- Why photography matters to the theory of history -- Ordinary film : Péter Forgács's The Maelstrom -- Graves of the insane, decorated -- On a certain blindness in teaching -- Beyond critical thinking -- Good and risky : on the promise of a liberal education. (shrink)

De facture classique, la philosophie de Simone Weil ne forme pas moins un ensemble de doctrines qu'unifie une intuition morale de portée métaphysique. La prescription de l'obéissance, de l'humilité, de la pauvreté traduisent une conception du moi qui, ayant une condition métaphysique illégitime de centre du monde, est appelé à renoncer à soi, à s'abandonner. Bref, créature jouissant d'une position usurpée de centre, il ne réalise sa vérité que par la décréation, mettant fin à la prétention d'un individu de valoir (...) comme une fin en soi exclusive... (shrink)

The philosophical and religious ideas of Simone Weil bear on theory of history and historiography in ways not previously explored. They amount to a view of history as a consequence of the original creation, but they also exclude theodicy. By examining these ideas we see some of the ways in which to develop a theory history centered on a conception of moral understanding that is impartialist and universal. For Weil such understanding is both inside of and outside of history. This (...) leads to an approach to human history that centers on the moral dilemmas and choices of historical actors and that matches the force of compassion with that of power. Under an approach inspired by Weil’s ideas, the historian’s work of understanding can be an experience of moral growth. (shrink)