11/07/2025 14:00
- 17:30
HALL: Seminar Room 01
Proponent:
Schneider P.
Chair:
Schneider P.
Speaker:
Casewell D.,
Lehmann S.,
Sojer T.
The life and work of philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) could be characterized by a state of always being in-between. Challenging the boundaries between thought and action, philosophy and mysticism, writing and political activism, her work serves as a testament to the struggle between striving toward supernatural love and the profane needs of the material world.
Born into an agnostic Jewish family and fueled by her lifelong commitment to the marginalized, she considered herself to live a life "in Christian inspiration," while nevertheless choosing to stay outside the Church. In her writings, this position is exemplified by frequent meditations on the phrase "Anathema sit," "Let them be excommunicated," and her identification with everything and everyone that shares the fate of being vilified or excluded. In her famous letters to the Dominican priest and resistance activist Joseph-Marie Perrin, she justifies her decision further by listing influences outside Christianity that—paradoxically—seem to have drawn her toward it: Greece, Egypt, India, China, and the beauty of the world, reflected in the arts and sciences.
Departing from her unorthodox approach to Christianity and her position as an outsider—in her own words: "a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception"—we want to invite researchers to shed light on some of the exiled, or as of yet largely unexplored, parts of Simone Weil's work.
Possible topics could include her idiosyncratic style of writing, her various influences from non-European traditions, her embrace of "heretical" Christian currents like Gnosticism, Manichaeism, or Catharism, the problematic and tragic blind spot of her willful ignorance of Judaism, but also her relationship to illness and the corporeal body, or her love of music, mathematics, poetry, or fairytales.