Jeremy Biles
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823227785
- eISBN:
- 9780823235193
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823227785.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226091310
- eISBN:
- 9780226091334
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226091334.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262373
- eISBN:
- 9780823266425
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262373.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Jeremy Biles
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823227785
- eISBN:
- 9780823235193
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823227785.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Beatrice Marovich
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474423632
- eISBN:
- 9781474438520
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423632.003.0031
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Oche Onazi
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748654673
- eISBN:
- 9780748693870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748654673.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sarah Daw
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474430029
- eISBN:
- 9781474453783
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474430029.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Lyndsey Stonebridge
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198797005
- eISBN:
- 9780191838637
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198797005.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Justin Broackes (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199289905
- eISBN:
- 9780191728471
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199289905.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
This book offers a detailed introduction to Iris Murdoch's philosophical work, especially the moral philosophy of The Sovereignty of Good (1970). Murdoch argued for an important and distinctive ...
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This book offers a detailed introduction to Iris Murdoch's philosophical work, especially the moral philosophy of The Sovereignty of Good (1970). Murdoch argued for an important and distinctive position, in opposition to the mid‐20th‐century analytic philosophers like R. M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire, and to existentialists like Sartre. Murdoch combined a form of moral realism or ‘naturalism’, allowing into the world cases of such properties as humility or generosity; an anti‐scientism; a rejection of Humean moral psychology; a sort of ‘particularism’; special attention to the virtues; and emphasis on the metaphor of moral perception or ‘seeing’ moral facts. (A similar combination of views is found in the work of John McDowell.) What we can choose depends on what we can see; what we can see depends in turn upon the conceptual scheme we have. This book presents some intellectual biography; the book investigates the arguments of The Sovereignty of Good and other articles; the book comments on the influence on Murdoch of Simone Weil, Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein; and on her historical approach; and the book introduces the contributions in the present volume.Less
This book offers a detailed introduction to Iris Murdoch's philosophical work, especially the moral philosophy of The Sovereignty of Good (1970). Murdoch argued for an important and distinctive position, in opposition to the mid‐20th‐century analytic philosophers like R. M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire, and to existentialists like Sartre. Murdoch combined a form of moral realism or ‘naturalism’, allowing into the world cases of such properties as humility or generosity; an anti‐scientism; a rejection of Humean moral psychology; a sort of ‘particularism’; special attention to the virtues; and emphasis on the metaphor of moral perception or ‘seeing’ moral facts. (A similar combination of views is found in the work of John McDowell.) What we can choose depends on what we can see; what we can see depends in turn upon the conceptual scheme we have. This book presents some intellectual biography; the book investigates the arguments of The Sovereignty of Good and other articles; the book comments on the influence on Murdoch of Simone Weil, Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein; and on her historical approach; and the book introduces the contributions in the present volume.
Barbara K. Gold
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198725206
- eISBN:
- 9780191792571
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198725206.003.0019
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226091310
- eISBN:
- 9780226091334
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226091334.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. This book ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and ...
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Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. This book ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In chapters on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, the book examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one's voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous. “To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these chapters, the book examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. The book investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.Less
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. This book ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In chapters on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, the book examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one's voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous. “To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these chapters, the book examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. The book investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.
Jeremy Biles
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823227785
- eISBN:
- 9780823235193
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823227785.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a “ferociously religious” sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. This book investigates the content and implications ...
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In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a “ferociously religious” sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. This book investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred. Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe (“formless”), the book demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice—an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form. Bataille enacts a “monstrous” mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists—a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. This book examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's “sacrificial” interpretations of Kojève's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist André Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with “hyperchristianity”; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's “religious sensibility”.Less
In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a “ferociously religious” sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. This book investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred. Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe (“formless”), the book demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice—an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form. Bataille enacts a “monstrous” mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists—a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. This book examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's “sacrificial” interpretations of Kojève's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist André Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with “hyperchristianity”; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's “religious sensibility”.
Roberto Esposito
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823276264
- eISBN:
- 9780823277001
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276264.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and ...
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This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, the book examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, the book traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of the notion and practice of “the impolitical.” Within the book, Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light,” 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.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, the book unravels the West's illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.Less
This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, the book examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, the book traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of the notion and practice of “the impolitical.” Within the book, Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light,” 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.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, the book unravels the West's illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.
Lily Gurton-Wachter
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804796958
- eISBN:
- 9780804798761
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804796958.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Julia T. Meszaros
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198765868
- eISBN:
- 9780191820502
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198765868.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion, Theology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Anna Wierzbicka
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195137330
- eISBN:
- 9780199867905
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195137337.003.0016
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
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 ...
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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 mesomething bad happened to this personthis person feels something bad because of thisI want to do something good for this person because of thisLess
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
Roberto Esposito
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823276264
- eISBN:
- 9780823277001
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276264.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sarah Cole
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780195389616
- eISBN:
- 9780199979226
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389616.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Roberto Esposito
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823276264
- eISBN:
- 9780823277001
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276264.003.0011
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Deborah Nelson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226457772
- eISBN:
- 9780226457949
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457949.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book identifies Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Simone Weil as a counter tradition of unsentimental writing and art that stands between the cultures of ...
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This book identifies Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Simone Weil as a counter tradition of unsentimental writing and art that stands between the cultures of irony and authenticity in the late twentieth century. Their work not only challenges empathy as the most important ethical model for attending to suffering in the postwar world, but also advocates for and demonstrates the ethics and aesthetics of the unsentimental. Played out at the level of style, this representational strategy required toughness, which is not desensitizing but rather re-sensitizing to the world, just not to other people's emotions. The book traces the careers of these women, who each had her own idiom for this unsentimental project. Simone Weil espoused a tragic formulation of justice in her embrace of a form of suffering so extreme its only analogy is the Crucifixion. Hannah Arendt described herself as heartless so as to elaborate an alternative to a politics of compassion. Mary McCarthy provided an aesthetic theory of the fact. Susan Sontag explored the problems of emotional self-regulation under late capitalism. Diane Arbus viewed failure as an ordinary part of self-fashioning, providing a pedagogy of helplessness. And Joan Didion pitched a battle with self-pity and self-delusion, which ground to a halt when she came to understand the grandiosity of hardness.Less
This book identifies Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Simone Weil as a counter tradition of unsentimental writing and art that stands between the cultures of irony and authenticity in the late twentieth century. Their work not only challenges empathy as the most important ethical model for attending to suffering in the postwar world, but also advocates for and demonstrates the ethics and aesthetics of the unsentimental. Played out at the level of style, this representational strategy required toughness, which is not desensitizing but rather re-sensitizing to the world, just not to other people's emotions. The book traces the careers of these women, who each had her own idiom for this unsentimental project. Simone Weil espoused a tragic formulation of justice in her embrace of a form of suffering so extreme its only analogy is the Crucifixion. Hannah Arendt described herself as heartless so as to elaborate an alternative to a politics of compassion. Mary McCarthy provided an aesthetic theory of the fact. Susan Sontag explored the problems of emotional self-regulation under late capitalism. Diane Arbus viewed failure as an ordinary part of self-fashioning, providing a pedagogy of helplessness. And Joan Didion pitched a battle with self-pity and self-delusion, which ground to a halt when she came to understand the grandiosity of hardness.
