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This chapter examines the connection between Simone Weil and St. Lazarus that emerges in Georges Bataille's novel Blue of Noon, arguing that Weil plays the role of a daimonic but saintly intercessor for Bataille in formulating an extremist surrealism. This anti-Bretonian surrealism is not only indebted to a certain reading of Weil, but coincides with Bataille's notion of hyperchristianity as embodied by the mystically inclined Weil. Bataille's decision to withhold publishing Blue of Noon until 1957—more than twenty years after authoring it and more than a decade after Weil's death—offers important clues to how to read not only the book but also Bataille's concept of hyperchristianity. The chapter discusses three quintessentially surrealist terms—chance, dream, and automatism. If the tension involved in the maintenance of this back-and-forth movement is understood as the passionate rage that communicates the high and the low, the verticality of ascent with the horizontality of the labyrinth, then it is no wonder that both Bataille and Weil, in mutually illuminating ways, find the cross at the heart of the labyrinth.

Headaches are a persistent subject in Simone Weil's spiritual autobiography. This chapter examines the phenomenon of attention—in her spiritual autobiography Weil identified its discovery with the overcoming of a despair so severe that it led her to contemplate suicide—in order to inquire how it became a discipline for forfeiting personality and consequently came to be associated with the affliction and violence requisite for such a renunciation. It considers how an ostensibly neutral phenomenon like attention could require violence, and how we might understand someone who attempted to separate personality from being—that is, with how we might value someone who herself valued impersonality at such tremendous cost. The chapter also looks at Weil's assertions beyond the pathology of self-hatred or cruelty. Moreover, it analyzes the frictive relations within Weil's writing on self-annihilation—she called it “de-creation”—as well as the relation between Weil's didactic imperatives for the achievement of that state and her representation of a person who lived such a reduced life.

Florence de Lussy traces the inner transformations and the tensions at play in the philosopher, mystic, and political activist Simone Weil that brought her tantalizingly close to Catholicism, shedding light on the problem of commitment in relation to French Catholic thought in the mid-twentieth century. As both an “insider” and an “outsider,” de Lussy shows how Weil illuminates the possibilities of Catholicism through her moving search for a form of engagement congruent with her life and thought. From her struggles with the rigidity and “totalitarian” jurisdiction of the Magisterium and her absolute commitment to free thought, to her Hellenic route to religious awareness and refusal of the distinction between the profane and the sacred, de Lussy highlights how the heterodox and modernist Weil called forth a Christianity that was embodied, open to the world, and fully engagé. Weil invites us to recognize the possible fault lines along which Catholicism could be renewed and reenergized.

This chapter focuses on Georges Bataille's unexpected embrace of Bretonian language, which he uses to critique André Breton and develop a sinister brand of surrealism. In doing so, he relies on an unexpected source of inspiration: Simone Weil. The chapter addresses opposing notions of reality in Breton and Bataille, arguing that for Bataille reality is ineluctably contradictory and base, whereas for Breton it is baseness itself that must be transfigured in the productions of surrealism. Particular attention is paid to the concept of the marvelous—central to the surrealist lexicon—as used by Breton and Bataille. Bataille's contradictions are a component of his notion of a counter-surrealism—or what he at one point calls “extremist surrealism”. An examination of the symbol of the labyrinth in the work of Bataille and Breton provides further grounds for demarcating the important differences between the two thinkers, while also setting the stage for a discussion of Bataille's vision of Simone Weil.

This chapter singles out and discusses a particular problem – largely overlooked by dominant communitarian critiques of liberalism – with human rights through the writings and insights of Simone Weil. The primary theme in this chapter is the conceptual value of human rights as a medium to recognise and respond to human suffering. Through Simone Weil's writings, it discusses why love must be central to the design of any institution, especially human rights institutions and approaches that seek to take human suffering seriously. It concludes by showing how the African moral philosophical outlook on the value of community, among other things, is supportive of this inclination to love. African moral philosophy allows us to understand community itself as something that is constituted or founded upon expressions of love and empathy.

Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on the political thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. If Weil was an early subject of Agamben’s intellectual curiosity, it would appear – judging from his published works – that her influence upon him has been neither central nor lasting.1 Leland de la Durantaye argues that Weil’s work has left a mark on Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, largely in his discussion of the concept of decreation; but de la Durantaye does not make much of Weil’s influence here, determining that her theory of decreation is ‘essentially dialectical’ and still too bound up with creation theology. 2 Alessia Ricciardi, however, argues that de la Durantaye’s dismissal of Weil’s influence is hasty.3 Ricciardi analyses deeper resonances between Weil’s and Agamben’s philosophies, ultimately claiming that Agamben ‘seems to extend many of the implications and claims of Weil’s idea of force’,4 arguably spreading Weil’s influence into Agamben’s reflections on sovereign power and bare life.

Chapter Five takes the temporal range of the book beyond the publication of Silent Spring, through analysis of the writing of Nature by the critic and novelist Mary McCarthy. The chapter reveals the governing influence of the French philosopher Simone Weil on McCarthy’s presentation of Nature as an ecological system in her fiction and non-fiction writing. The chapter reads McCarthy’s 1971 novel Birds of America alongside her first two Vietnam War reports, Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), which she interrupted the writing of Birds to research. This approach reveals the continuity of ideas between McCarthy’s fiction and non-fiction writing from this period, as well as the sustained philosophical and rhetorical influence of Weil. Analysis of these non-fiction texts alongside the novel illuminates McCarthy’s literary presentations of an ecological Nature and her particularly nuanced response to her fellow Americans’ growing environmental consciousness in Birds of America.

For Simone Weil, deracination was the tragic condition of modern times, affecting not only refugees and the dispossessed, but all who capitalism and colonialism had torn from their roots. This chapter turns to her last works to connect her work on rootlessness to Weil’s critique of human rights. ‘To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides,’ she wrote. Rights are there to be fought for, contracted, defended; as such, they have served the same forces of expansion and domination that, as she demonstrated in her sublime wartime reading of the Iliad, relentlessly transform the living into ‘things’. Nobody from the period went further into the dark background of difference than Weil. The problem was that she could not find a way out. In the end, Weil’s efforts to live by charity alone—to root oneself in the suffering of others—were as death-driven as the forces of injustice and imperialism she railed against.

Simone Weil wrote her powerful essay, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, in 1939–40, during the fall of France, her native country, to the Nazis. The most compelling thing she sees in Homer’s poem of war is the idea of force. This chapter falls into three closely interrelated parts. It first discusses Weil’s personal background, then focuses on her reaction to/interpretation of the Iliad, and how her analysis of Homer’s poem must be read as gendered. Third, it details the ways in which (mostly) male critics of and commentators on the Iliad have reacted to Weil’s essay on Homer, and the ways in which male critics and translators have approached the Iliad. Weil gives us an inspiring example of how an ancient text can be put to the service of explaining one’s own life and culture.

The afterword turns from Keats’s attitude reading about war in Milton—saying “so it is”—to Simone Weil, who is preoccupied with a “decreative” model of attention as retreat and passivity, as not taking sides, and whose interpretation of The Iliad finds Homer remarkable in his ability also to represent war without taking sides. Weil’s 1939 essay, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, suggests what a literary criticism of mere attention might look like, since Weil described her methodology as just looking, anticipating recent rejections of critique and suspicion in interpretation. For Weil, attention should be radically impersonal, as it is in Emily Dickinson’s 1863 “Four Trees,” a poem about the minimal action of noticing the overlooked background of a landscape, and the white space behind poems. Noticing something else during war is the slight but crucial shift invited by the Romantic poetics of attention, and its afterlife.

Chapter 3 analyses the thought on love and the self of three modern thinkers who echo single elements of Kierkegaard’s thought but radicalize these to the effect of disconnecting selfless love from human flourishing. Nygren’s and Weil’s austere perspectives on love and the self represent a tendency among twentieth-century religious thinkers to view the modern concern with the finite individual as being at odds with true love and, thus, to reject desirous love in favour of self-giving love. Sartre’s emancipatory existentialism is illustrative of the secular modern tendency to understand love less in terms of a concern for the other, and more in terms of self-assertion over against the other. It is shown that Tillich and Murdoch adopt elements of both sides of the debate, and seek to integrate these with a view towards reconnecting selfless love and human flourishing.

This chapter considers the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. It argues that each one thinks in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light, in the silence of the other's voice, in the emptiness of the other's plenitude. To think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought. It is precisely this “remainder,” this “boundary,” this “partition” that divides while joining and separates while combining that is the object of the present analysis. The chapter then turns examines the question for which the two thinkers appear to be most distant: the relation between action and work, between praxis and poiesis, between the political sphere and the social sphere.

This chapter supports, in essence, the traditional interpretation of the parable, while at the same time expressing its message in a new, simple and universal language. It rejects fanciful recent interpretations such as that proposed by the French research group Entrevernes (1978), Robert Funk (1982) or James Breech (1983). Drawing on Simone Weil's commentary on the parable, it traces throughout the Gospels Jesus’ emphasis on compassion and absolute inclusiveness, and it explicates the way of thinking encouraged by Jesus as follows:

this person is someone like me

something bad happened to this person

this person feels something bad because of this

I want to do something good for this person because of this

Taking as its touchstone the passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus is beaten on the hands, the introduction establishes key principles for reading violence in modernist literature: violence is imagined as the site of multiple origins and primary subjectivity; it is located in the body and at the crux of culture; it often begins as allegory (for instance by suggesting violence against humans through representations of violence against animals) yet it also collapses allegory into incarnation; most generally, the effort to find literary forms for violence stands at the very crux of literary self-definition. The introduction amplifies key terms in the book such as force and political violence, and develops two poles of historical thinking about violence in the period, the spectacular (where violence is hyperbolic and intensely visual, as in WWI) and the hidden (where violence remains mute and effaced). It also clarifies the book's relation to several important critical conventions about WWI and modernism, and provides brief chapter summaries.

This chapter argues that Weil's overturning of Arendt's views is not limited to the judgment on Rome. The very Christianity that Arendt situates as the commencement of the drift toward the modern constitutes for Weil both its internal rampart and its principle source of contention simultaneously. Indeed, for Weil Christianity is the spiritual thread that allows modernity to continue advancing in light of its originary inspiration. This does not mean that the two interpretative horizons are openly contradictory. They even coincide at one point precisely in their severe judgment of historical Christianity, which, paradoxically, Weil blames for the de-Christianization of our times. However, their two perspectives diverge once again as Arendt observes that this phenomenon surely occurs because Christianity is lacking in mundane, public figures. In contrast, Weil believes that it is precisely Christianity's spirituality that makes it the unique, authentic “continuation” of Greece.