Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-denial PDF Download

Author: Athanasios Moulakis
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211620
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Because it is impossible to distinguish Weil's life from her thought, her writings cannot be understood properly without linking them to her life and character. By situating Weil's political thought within the context of the intellectual climate of her time, Moulakis connects it also to her epistemology, her cosmology, and her personal experience.

Author: Richard H. Bell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847690800
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Simone Weil (1909-1943), a French philosopher of Jewish origin, is regarded by commentators as a classic example of the "self-hating Jew" and an inheritor of many religious traditions, belonging to none specifically. Ch. 9 (pp. 165-189), "Simone Weil, Post-Holocaust Judaism, and the Way of Compassion, " contends that Weil's Jewish background influenced her thought. As a victim of anti-Jewish laws, she believed in God even when He was silent and hid His countenance from humanity. Had Weil survived the war, her reaction to the Holocaust might have been consonant with that of the fictional Yossel Rakover, the hero of Zvi Kolitz's short story.

Author: Kathryn Lawson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350344478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil were two of the most compelling political thinkers of the 20th century who, despite having similar life-experiences, developed radically distinct political philosophies. This unique dialogue between the writings of Arendt and Weil highlights Arendt's secular humanism, her emphasis on heroic action, and her rejection of the moral approach to politics, contrasted starkly with Weil's religious approach, her faith in the power of divine Goodness, and her other-centric ethic of suffering and affliction. The writings here respect the profound differences between Arendt and Weil whilst pulling out the shared preoccupations of power, violence, freedom, resistance, responsibility, attention, aesthetics, and vulnerability. Without shying away from exploring the more difficult concepts in these philosophers' works, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil also aims to pull out the relevance of their writings for contemporary issues.

Author: A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786601338
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Offering new insight into the pertinence of Simone Weil’s thought, this volume situates her in the Continental discourses which constituted her philosophical background, her milieu, and which frequently reflected her departures from her contemporaries.

Author: Eric O. Springsted
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268200238
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This in-depth study examines the social, religious, and philosophical thought of Simone Weil. Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century presents a comprehensive analysis of Weil’s interdisciplinary thought, focusing especially on the depth of its challenge to contemporary philosophical and religious studies. In a world where little is seen to have real meaning, Eric O. Springsted presents a critique of the unfocused nature of postmodern philosophy and argues that Weil’s thought is more significant than ever in showing how the world in which we live is, in fact, a world of mysteries. Springsted brings into focus the challenges of Weil’s original (and sometimes surprising) starting points, such as an Augustinian priority of goodness and love over being and intellect, and the importance of the Crucifixion. Springsted demonstrates how the mystical and spiritual aspects of Weil’s writings influence her social thought. For Weil, social and political questions cannot be separated from the supernatural. For her, rather, the world has a sacramental quality, such that life in the world is always a matter of life in God—and life in God, necessarily a way of life in the world. Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century is not simply a guide or introduction to Simone Weil. Rather, it is above all an argument for the importance of Weil’s thought in the contemporary world, showing how she helps us to understand the nature of our belonging to God (sometimes in very strange and unexpected ways), the importance of attention and love as the root of both the love of God and neighbor, the importance of being rooted in culture (and culture’s service to the soul in rooting it in the universe), and the need for human beings to understand themselves as communal beings, not as isolated thinkers or willers. It will be essential reading for scholars of Weil, and will also be of interest to philosophers and theologians.

Author: Palle Yourgrau
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 186189998X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Simone Weil, legendary French philosopher, political activist, and mystic, died in 1943 at a sanatorium in Kent, England, at the age of thirty-four. During her brief lifetime, Weil was a paradox of asceticism and reclusive introversion who also maintained a teaching career and an active participation in politics. In this concise biography, Palle Yourgrau outlines Weil’s influential life and work and demonstrates how she tried to apply philosophy to everyday life. Born in Paris to a cultivated Jewish-French family, Weil excelled at philosophy, and her empathetic political conscience channeled itself into political engagement and activism on behalf of the working class. Yourgrau assesses Weil’s controversial critique of Judaism as well as her radical re-imagination of Christianity—following a powerful religious experience in 1937—in light of Plato’s philosophy as a bridge between human suffering and divine perfection. In Simone Weil, Yourgrau provides careful, concise readings of Weil’s work while exploring how Weil has come to be seen as both a modern saint and a bête noir, a Jew accused of having abandoned her own people in their hour of greatest need.

Author: Alexander Irwin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639021
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The transgressive writing of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and the rigorous ethical philosophy of social activist and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) seem to belong to different worlds. Yet in the political ferment of 1930s Paris, Bataille and Weil were intellectual adversaries who exerted a powerful fascination on each other. Saints of the Impossible provides the first in-depth comparison of Bataille's and Weil's thought, showing how an exploration of their relationship reveals new facets of the achievements of two of the twentieth century's leading intellectual figures and raises far-reaching questions about literary practice, politics, and religion. Book jacket.

Author: Benjamin P. Davis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538171961
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
"Davis demonstrates how Simone Weil's Marxism challenges current neoliberal understandings of the self and of human rights. Explaining her related critiques of colonialism and of political parties, it presents Weil as a twentieth-century political philosopher who anticipated and critically responded to the most contemporary political theory"--

Author: Franziska Hoppen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000359344
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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This book departs from the attempt by political theory to confront the challenges of political life with new concepts, offering instead a mode of thought so far excluded from the canon of political theory: the philosophy of presence. Making the experience of liminality the very centre of thought, it shows how embracing ‘in-betweenness’ allows us to discern the limits of both the political order and contemporary political theory. Through an examination of the works of Gustav Landauer, Eric Voegelin, Simone Weil and Václav Havel, the author demonstrates the manner in which ‘in-betweenness’ may be cultivated by way of the philosophy of presence as a method of self-enquiry into existence as it is experienced subjectively. Arguing that since externalisation is the essence of politics and that the way to a more just society lies inwards, through a confrontation with liminality, this study of how to read philosophers of presence renders their work intelligible to the contemporary discourse of crisis and will appeal to scholars of social, political and anthropological theory and philosophy.

Author: Marc De Kesel
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438494165
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
In spirituality and mysticism, many seek a counterbalance to the strong emphasis on the self that modernity demands of us: We desire a fixed self on the one hand and are fascinated by selflessness on the other. But is our fascination with selflessness not a ruse to make that self of ours even stronger? And is that self-critical question not the kernel of even traditional mysticism? Marc De Kesel investigates some dark rooms of the mystical tradition to clarify this. This is a book for all who want to free themselves from the conceptual frameworks and rigid dogmas of late-modern religiosity. The first part of the volume deals directly with early modern Christian mysticism, and more specifically with the French spiritualité and discussions centered around the problem of what it means to love God in a pure, radically unselfish way. The second part explores the paradoxical dialectics between self and selflessness in relation to the way Christian religion deals with its own identity. If Christian love is selfless, why has Christianity in the end not given up its own self, its own identity? The third and last part of the volume discusses the dialectics between self and selflessness in three other domains: popular spirituality, politics, and modern science. It makes clear that "selflessness" is not limited to mysticism but is both a fascination and a problem/paradox for modernity in many fields.