Simone Weil Archives - Public Seminar

Gender

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

October 11, 2022 • by Skye C. Cleary and Luis Jaramillo

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

Migration

Instead of Comparing

Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past

October 19, 2020 • by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

“History” as an academic discipline – and I am trying to articulate a possible vanishing point of Reinhart Koselleck’s life work here – “History” as a discipline would never have come into being without the existence of the “historical world view” as a specific social construction of temporality (we can ...

Feature

Who’s Afraid of Workplace Democracy?

Research indicates cooperatives manage resources just as efficiently

January 19, 2017 • by Katarina Spasic

What is so remarkable when it comes to Weil’s notion of oppression is that she insists that oppression is inherent to managerial practice. Her work offers an ethical basis for the critical analysis of management, science, and expertise. One of her famous quotes reads, “When someone exposes himself as a ...

Feature

Simone Weil, Friend of Job

Confronting the Beauty of the Terror of our Existence

December 7, 2016 • by Mark Larrimore

An aphorism by Simone Weil sits atop a manuscript I’ve never been able to finish. The manuscript is called “The Problem of Good” and the quotation from Weil goes: Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, ...

Feature

Saint Simone

Simone Weil and Revolutionary Politics

October 27, 2016 • by Lisabeth During

In the November 1933 issue of the dissident communist journal La Critique Sociale, two nonconformists of the French left took sharply opposed positions on the “catastrophic” character of revolutionary struggle. Both connected to the Communist Democratic Circle, both friends of its founder Boris Souvarine, they disagreed about action. And they ...