Panel: SIMONE WEIL AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY



655.8 - THE VIOLENCE OF THE GOOD? SIMONE WEIL AND THE RISK OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY

AUTHORS:
Sojer T. (University of Erfurt ~ Erfurt ~ Germany)
Text:
Simone Weil's thought offers political theology powerful resources for diagnosing force, uprootedness, and collective idolatry. Yet it also contains deeply troubling practical implications. This paper argues that these are not accidental blind spots, but consequences of the same structure that gives her thought its clarity. Weil subordinates politics to an absolute order of truth, necessity, and the good. This sharpens her critique of domination, but at the same time weakens the claims of rights, pluralism, and procedural restraint. The danger in Weil is therefore not external to her most potent ideas, but internal to them. Reading Weil through the lens of political theology, I argue that her work exposes a constitutive risk within political theology itself: wherever politics is ordered to an absolute image of truth and the good, spiritual radicality can turn into political coercion.