Elisabeth Hubmann: Organ improvisations in response to Simone Weil’s “Les Lutins du feu”

Death is everywhere in the oeuvre of Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik – as theme or topic, as a protective force from the threatening silence of self-inflicted oppression, as a means of acknowledging the precarious nature of the poet’s effort, and, eventually, as the flickering presence of concrete thoughts about killing oneself. Simone Weil’s thoughts about decreation and her non-linear understanding of death help us gaining traction of the specific relations between text and death, the body and the world, the ineffable and that which resists in Pizarnik’s poetry instead of reading her suicide(s) literally as the ultimate signified of a coherent and death-prone poetic project.  Rather than being an instance of writing towards death as inescapable destiny, Pizarnik’s words gracefully radiate out of death as poetic (de)creations beyond the constraints of meaning and social determination.

Johanna Nuber is an assistant professor in Romance studies at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.

For more information, visit: www.simoneweil-denkkollektiv.de

Johanna Nuber (Halle) on "Reading Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetics of the corpse"

Though she refrained from formal baptism, Simone Weil's writings and her life undeniably involve a turning toward God. An admirer of Plato, Weil moreover held that the experience of reading poetry, with its focus on beauty, form, and restraint, is strikingly reflective of spiritual conversion. In this podcast, we'll examine Weil’s account of her conversion in Waiting for God, particularly as it relates to her understanding of poetry and attention.

Emily King is Elsa Marty Fellow at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

For more information, visit: www.simoneweil-denkkollektiv.de

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Emily King (Chicago) on "Poetry as Decreation"

Linn Tonstad is interested in Weil as a possible model of writing the suffering body, especially in the sense of the body that suffers limitation or non-immunity to what threatens and changes. “The body” appears in most academic writing as a reified object of contemplation, rather than as the origin of writing itself. Does Weil’s language allow thingification as a writing strategy to open up what is more than a thing? 

Linn Tonstad is associate professor of theology, Yale Divinity School. 

Fore more information, visit: www.simoneweil-denkkollektiv.de

Linn Tonstad (Yale) on "Writing the Suffering Body"

What are the chances for grace on a broken planet? In times like ours, it seems almost frivolous to seek conceptual refuge in the idea of grace and its aspiration to "ascend to the celestial spheres" (Sor Juana). And yet, radical efforts of graceful repair and decreation will be needed to come to terms with the brokenness of this planet. Are we able and ready to think of grace-in-the-flesh as a critical intervention into spiritual matters where matter matters as much as the spiritual?

Samir Sellami is a literary critic and scholar based in Berlin.

For more information, visit: www.simoneweil-denkkollektiv.de

Samir Sellami (Berlin) on "Grace on a Broken Planet"

In her Notebooks, Weil develops a metaphysical understanding in which embodied experience merges the individual with the ‘primordial’ void (le vide) she calls ‘God’ (Weil, Notes, 2004). The contours of this void are found through physical engagement with reality where the material world manifests the absence of God as a hyper-presence. In this respect, the present close reading considers Weil’s idea of the transference of attention and the ‘alliance between matter and real feelings’, inquiring into her claim that ‘[t]he joy and spiritual significance of the feast is situated within the special delicacy associated with the feast’ (Weil, First & Last Notebooks, 1970).

Gwendolen Dupré holds a MPhil in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Cambridge and is currently a prospective PhD candidate in French Studies as well as in Theology & Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow.

For more information, visit: www.simoneweil-denkkollektiv.de

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Gwendolen Dupré (Glasgow) on "Simone Weil's Void and the Delicacies of the Feast"

So-called western society, broadly speaking ,still relates more comfortably to historical examples of the “enfant terrible” who gains power and prestige by bending others to their will. In L’Enracinement ,Simone Weil proposes a compromised, heuristic State with the goal of educating a way this ersatzform of greatness by teaching the material and spiritual love of neighbor. Weil proposes, and I attempt to theorize, an alternative and true conception of greatness rooted in compassion for the oppressed.

Scott Ritner is an assistant professor of Political Science at Temple University (Philadelphia) and vice-president of the American Weil Society. 

For more information, visit: www.simoneweil-denkkollektiv.de

Scott Ritner (Philadelphia) on “Revolutionary Pessimism”

Simone Weil draws thought toward that drift in which “extreme attention” becomes identified with “prayer.”  In lieu of an act of “interpretation” that would actively produce textual signification out of the materials that lie at its disposal,  she gestures toward a practice of looking at objects—and continuing to look upon them until “the light suddenly dawns.”  Reading is thus a kind of self-forgetting—that is, not so much a total annihilation than a suspension of intention, and in that suspension, an emptying of thought into a readiness to receive the object as it enters le vide that thought has necessarily become in order to be thought.  Such an orientation toward understanding realizes an auto-dislocation from conventional epistemological and phenomenological centerings around the I that grasps what is around and brought before it.  I would like to lend time to the relationships that are traced between this being en attente; the ego’s relinquishment (particularly as it is enacted in and through writing-as-waiting); and the arrival of illumination from without.  Touch-points that offer lines of sight for this exploration include literary moments of preoccupation with a mirror that holds no face in view (an image that recurs in the writings of both Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector); and the notion of wu wei in Taoist philosophy, which translates into a non-programmatic principle of nonaction.  What forms of sustenance and disorientation attend this seeing without a self to hold that looking?  And how does the extremity of an anti-narcissistic stance avoid re-consolidating the grounds of the I through the concentration on its absence?  In what senses might decreation be scarcely exhausted by obliteration?  And how might Weil’s notion of attention be re-thought without the presumption of a self that was.

Michelle Ty is assistant professor of English at Clemson University.

For more information, visit: www.simoneweil-denkkollektiv.de

Michelle Ty (Berlin) on “On Self-Forgetting”

In her podcast, Isabella approaches the reading of La pesanteur et la grâce (1947) from a cultural studies perspective, namely, the extent to which new texts are created in the process of cutting up and assembling. In addition to the inevitable question of the author's function, she also considers artistic forms of expression, such as the collage by Thomas Hirschhorn, "A Simone Weil Map", which he created during the lockdown in Paris in spring 2020.

Isabella is a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kiel. She was previously a researcher at the universities of Würzburg, Erfurt and Jena. She studied Greek and Latin Philology as well as Philosophy in Würzburg, Thessaloniki and Padova. She received her MA in Ancient Greek from the University of Würzburg and her PhD in Religious Studies (Orthodox Christianity) from the University of Erfurt. Her current research project is about the relationships between Religion, Dance and Race in Nazi Germany.

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