Literature and Hope: Sartre’s Commitment, Camus’ Rebellion and Weil’s 'Metaxu'
Christine Howe (University of Wollongong)
Cite Article: Vitalpoetics, Vol.1 No.1, January 2008
“Abyss of hope, what an opening, what lightning, what thunder, what a
passageway.
What an entrance.“
Charles Péguy1
“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.“
Albert Camus2
French poet Charles Péguy, in the words of Robert Royal, conceived of hope as “a living force – perhaps the living cosmic force – that enables us to gaze at the fullness of reality, in fact brings us into closer contact with the real” (“The Literary Value of Hope” 165). This suggestion that hope is able to illuminate present realities is also found in the work of French mystic, philosopher and political activist, Simone Weil. Weil’s form of hope is not focused on the future but is grounded in the present, inspired by things of beauty that have the potential to direct one’s attention towards the divine. She uses the Greek term metaxu to describe these things, which act as intermediaries between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine. In Weil’s The Need for Roots, the role of literature is inseparable from her wider project of seeking to articulate the problems of her time, and to offer alternatives for the development of a more just society. Inherent in her search for justice is a sense of hope that seeks to see in and beyond the injustices of the world a deeper reality characterized by love, truth and beauty. Weil’s writings on hope intersect with those of her contemporary, Albert Camus, for whom the existence of beauty provides the grounds for hope. Weil and Camus, in contrast to Jean-Paul Sartre, advocate a hope oriented towards the present. Sartre, in his call for committed literature, focuses on a future-oriented hope, suggesting that literary works should be written with the view to realising future political goals. These three perspectives on the nature of hope and the role of literature, formulated in France in the mid 20th century, give an insight into the ways in which contemporary literature may be able to inspire hope.
The creative and philosophical works Sartre and Camus produced during the late 1940s and early 1950s reveal two men struggling to find a creative, humane path that would lead people out of a preceding half century characterized by, as Camus described it in The Rebel, the uprooting, enslavement, and death of more than seventy million people (11). Their political and literary visions became increasingly different during those years, however, eventually resulting in a complete breakdown of their personal and intellectual relationship.3 Ronald Aronson suggests that the philosophical split between Sartre and Camus reveals the “splintering of hope” the Left experienced during the Cold War. Hopes for human freedom and for socialism were torn apart as people were faced with what Aaronson describes as an “impossible choice” between Sartre’s realism, which saw an alliance with Communism as the only way to move towards concrete social change; and Camus’ “principled leftist rejection of Communism”, which isolated him from the largest force working for change (Camus and Sartre 5). David Sprintzen also recognises the significance of the debate between Sartre and Camus, suggesting that “many of the most significant passions and struggles of modernity reverberate throughout this confrontation” (Sartre and Camus 72). Both Sartre and Camus addressed the question of literary commitment in terms of their wider hopes for social change. An analysis of their views on the interaction between politics and literature gives an insight into the various hopes that characterized the post-war period and the reasons for their decline.
Sartre articulated his concept of a politically engaged, or committed, literature in a series of articles that appeared in Les Temps Modernes in 1947, later published in English as What is Literature? The key ideas expressed in these articles relate to the role of literature and the transcendence of human freedom. Sartre suggests that a work of prose is a site of freedom for both reader and writer. The author exercises freedom in the writing of the text, as he or she creates another world. The reader, in turn, exercises freedom in allowing him or herself to become involved in the created world of the novel or play, the ultimate aim being the creation of a classless society in which literature would become “the world aware of itself, suspended in a free act, and offering itself to the free judgement of all men, the reflective self-awareness of a classless society” (What is Literature? 118). However, as that classless society had yet to be created, the first goal of literature was to operate within the historical bounds of the author’s own time, working towards two connected ends: an awakening of the reader to his or her own freedom, and the creation of a socialist democracy.
To write for one’s age is not to reflect it passively, it is to want to maintain it or change it, thus to go beyond it towards the future, and it is this effort to change it that places us most deeply within it… (What is Literature? 236)
For Sartre, it is in the revolutionary movement towards the future that hope is expressed, in literary works as in politics.
The future-oriented hope Sartre proposes is embodied in the character of Goetz in the final scenes of Sartre’s play Lucifer and the Lord. Goetz reveals Sartre’s belief that the most effective way to create change is by full involvement in the historical circumstances of his time.4 Having passed through several different stages of belief and illusion, Goetz’s existential journey finally culminates in his resolution to command an army. The first action he takes after he is established as the head of the army is to murder one of the captains. He then proclaims: “The kingdom of man is beginning. A fine start” (Lucifer and the Lord 140-141). The hope lies in the fact that he has decided to become a man of action, to fight to bring about a better future; and that he has proved himself capable of doing this by carrying out an act of murder. In contrast, Camus believed that violence is only acceptable in a revolutionary context if rebels are prepared to be condemned and face their own deaths: “[he] kills and dies so that it shall be clear that murder is impossible” (The Rebel 246). Susan Neiman has offered the following assessment of the hope offered by Sartre and Camus:
If Sartre’s metaphysical claims seem to give more room for action, his characters give no reason for optimism about its results. Sartre tells us that other people are the source of hell. Camus lets us hope they might prevent it. (Evil in Modern Thought 297)
Hope that is firmly focused on the future, as can be seen in Sartre’s passionate call for politically engaged literature, can have a tendency to overlook the means by which a goal is reached, in preference for the desired end. It was this aspect of Sartre’s work that Camus so strongly objected to. Camus regarded Sartre’s concept of committed literature as an imposition of the political onto the realm of the literary.5 He felt that “the theory of engaged literature, by requiring the writer’s political involvement, destroyed his freedom” (qtd. in Aronson Camus and Sartre 212). As Aronson points out, Camus rejected Sartre’s willingness to set aside temporary human freedom in exchange for the advancement of his ultimate end; he felt it necessary to reserve a space outside any given historical context for moral judgement (Camus and Sartre 59). From within this space, Camus offered the following indictment on the revolutionary events of his time: “The rebels, who have decided to gain their ends through violence and murder, have in vain replaced, in order to preserve the hope of existing, the ‘we are’ by a ‘we shall be’” (The Rebel 246). The hope of a utopian future had become the justification for murder committed in the present.6
Rejecting this model, Camus felt that revolutionary activity should be focused on the impact of political action in the present. An interchange between two characters in Camus’s play The Just Assassins expresses the absurdity he saw in revolutionary activity that was directed solely towards the future. Dora cries out in despair, “Peace! When will we find peace?” Kaliayev’s answer is laden with irony: “Tomorrow!” (Caligula and Other Plays 199). In The Rebel, Camus offers an alternative to this form of revolutionary action:
revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date, but in terms of the obscure existence which is already made manifest in the act of insurrection. This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can best be described by examining it in its pure state – in artistic creation. (218)
This proposal effectively turns Sartre’s theory of literary commitment on its head. Instead of a concrete political goal guiding the creation of literary works, Camus advocated the opposite: that the process of literary creation itself should inform political action.7
The conflict that arose between Sartre and Camus reveals the complexity of the relationship between politics, literature and hope. Sartre’s future-oriented hope, revealed in Goetz’s actions in Lucifer and the Lord, offers the possibility of working together towards creating a future utopia, but at what cost? The hope Camus identifies in the moment of creative insurrection presents an alternative to a revolutionary literature and politics that focuses on the future at the expense of the present.8 It is the existence of beauty that gives Camus hope that living ethically and fully in the present is possible. In beauty is found the promise of a “living transcendence”, focused neither on the future on this earth, or in life after death, but on the present (The Rebel 224). It is through its expression of beauty, therefore, that art is able to inspire hope:
Art… leads us back to the origins of rebellion, to the extent that it tries to give its form to an elusive value which the future perpetually promises, but which the artist presents and wishes to snatch from the grasp of history. (The Rebel 224)
This assessment of the role of beauty is similar to that elucidated by Simone Weil. Occupying a central position in the intersection between art and hope, beauty is described by Weil as having the ability to draw one’s attention and desire away from an imagined future good towards what actually exists (Gravity and Grace 58). It is on this point that the similarities between the role Weil ascribes to art in The Need for Roots and Camus’ aesthetics becomes clear. Camus had great respect for Weil: he was instrumental in the publication of several of her works after her death; and in the Preface he wrote for the first edition of The Need for Roots he referred to her as “the only great mind of our time” (qtd. in Dunaway “Estrangement and the Need for Roots” 35). He quotes her directly in relation to the conditions of factory workers in passages in The Rebel,9 and in his notebooks during the time he was researching material for the same book there are also many references to Weil (Dunaway “Estrangement and the Need for Roots” 40). Whether his reading of her work influenced Camus directly, or whether his own intellectual and political ideas simply resonated with hers is debatable, but the fact remains that there are important points of intersection in their work.10 John Randolf LeBlanc, who has published a book length study on the ethical and aesthetic aspects of Weil and Camus’ political thought, finds many similarities between these two writers, particularly in terms of the way their work addresses the interaction between art, labour and politics. Indeed, he suggests that it is precisely “the relationship between work and art and the creative component that these two activities share” that characterizes both Weil’s and Camus’ political thought (Ethics and Creativity 96). In their attempts to address these central aspects of human society, Camus and Weil, disillusioned with the revolutionary movements of the time, both explored the possibility that art was able inspire a form of hope that illuminated the beauty of the present, instead of offering the promise of a future utopia. These ideas had their basis in, as Dunaway has recognised, “the same profound compassion for a world exiled from the kingdom of rootedness” (“Estrangement and the Need for Roots” 42).11
Weil’s concept of roots is central to her aesthetics. Her response to colonialism is a good introduction to both this and other key aspects of her ethical and political thought. The reason Weil objected so strongly to colonialism was because of the destruction it caused to people’s roots. In 1943, she wrote an essay entitled “East and West”, in which she drew an analogy between Nazism and colonialism:
Hitlerism consists in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination. […] This analogy exposes the hollowness of all the arguments in favour of the colonial system. Because every one of these arguments, good, bad, and indifferent, is also used by Germany… (Selected Essays 199)
Nazism mirrored colonialism in that it inflicted on European countries the same “evil of uprootedness” that had been wrought on colonized peoples: “the conquered countries… become uprooted through the loss of their past. To lose one’s past is to fall into colonial servitude” (Weil Selected Essays 199). One of the failings of modern society, according to Weil, was the lack of concern for maintaining past traditions and respecting the importance of community heritage. Her thoughts on this matter are revealed in a passage in The Need for Roots: “For several centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad” (51). The disregard for the preservation and continuing relevance of communities’ roots that Weil identified in both colonialism and Nazism was, in her eyes, merely an extreme version of the general uprootedness affecting western culture as a whole.12 The responsibility for these “monstrous conditions” in which people were living she located in the underlying ideologies governing modern science, history and art, which she believed needed to be transformed if there was to be any hope of seeing “the dawn of a better civilization” (The Need for Roots 235).
This state of uprootedness, according to Weil, was in large part due to an idolisation of force. In her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” Weil defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing,” that, when exercised to the limit, literally turns a person into a thing: from a living, breathing being to a corpse (Simone Weil: An Anthology 183).13 Force is blind and indeterminate, and beyond human control.14 Although a person may believe he or she possesses force, in reality both victim and victor are equally at its mercy: while one is broken by it, the other is intoxicated (Simone Weil: An Anthology 191). Far from being something utilized by the strong to control the weak, force exercises power over both: “To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use [force] and those who endure it are turned to stone” (Simone Weil: An Anthology 204). Weil offers a scathing critique of modern society’s assumption that force reigns supreme:
Today, science, history, politics, the organization of labour, religion even… offer nothing to men’s minds except brute force. Such is our civilization. It is a tree which bears the fruit it deserves (The Need for Roots 291).15
It is Weil’s intention not only to recognise the existence of force, but to also suggest that there is another, stronger power that force is ultimately obedient to. For Weil, it is this power – which she refers to variously as Eternal Wisdom, Justice, Love, Truth, God, beauty, absolute good, and the reality outside the world – that is the source of all good that exists in this world, and imposes limits on force (The Need for Roots 282). One of the effects of uprootedness is that this reality has been obscured, and force taken its place at the centre of society.
The Need for Roots can be read as an assertion of the existence of a power other than force, and of ways to establish societies with this reality at their foundation. It is in the fact that force does not rule supreme that Weil locates the grounds for hope. That the “brute force of matter” is obedient to a higher good is, for Weil, “the visible and palpable promise here below, the sure basis of hope. That is the truth which bites at our hearts every time we are penetrated by the beauty of the world” (The Need for Roots 282). It is in this quote that the link between Weil’s aesthetics, ethics and politics becomes clear. The terrible events of the twentieth century, characterized by violence and the uprooting of countless communities, were, according to this assessment, ultimately the result of a belief in the supremacy of force. Hope does not come from a belief that justice may be able to be imposed by the use of force, but that beyond the world there exists an absolute good to which force is obedient. It is beauty that has the potential to awaken this hope.
In one of her early essays Weil claimed that the most creative of the world’s civilizations set aside an empty space for the supernatural at the centre, around which every other aspect of life was constructed (Oppression and Liberty 168). This belief clarifies Weil’s project in The Need for Roots. In order for a society to be organised in such a way as to allow for the needs of each individual to be met, she believed that an emphasis on the divine conceived as space – as absence rather than concrete presence – was essential. Every element of her work revolves around this central point. The foremost role of society, in this case, is to provide each person with links to the divine; hence the importance she placed on all aspects of a person’s roots: culture, country, labour, language. It is not surprising, then, that for Weil the value of literature, along with every other human endeavour, lies in its ability to provide openings onto the divine. These bridges, created by people’s roots, Weil refers to as metaxu. A Greek term taken from Plato, metaxu literally means “intermediary” or “between”.16 Weil uses it to refer to those things that provide links between the human and the divine. Metaxu are not an end in themselves however: they are integral steps in the path towards the transcendent good they point towards. Weil’s interpretation of ancient Greek culture led her to make the following remarks, which reveal the connection between force and metaxu: “Civilization of the Greeks. No adoration of force. The temporal was only a bridge” (Gravity and Grace 134). Metaxu play a central role in Weil’s project for creating societies that at their core are based on love and justice.
In Weil’s terminology, poetry retains a special significance that applies to actions and objects as much as to the written word. It is the effect poetry has on people’s lives that determines its value:
the people need poetry as they need bread. Not the poetry closed inside words: by itself that is no use to them. They need poetry to be the very substance of daily life. Such poetry can come from one source only and that is God. (Simone Weil: An Anthology 268)
Poetry in this instance (and throughout Weil’s writings) becomes more than the written word, more than anything able to be expressed through language: it becomes the very connection that links people with the divine. Poetry becomes metaxu, recognised not in the qualities or characteristics of a particular form of writing, but in its function as a bridge between the human and the divine.
Weil’s poetics coincides with her ethics most obviously in her insistence on the importance of attention. She draws a parallel between creativity and loving action, suggesting that both are the result of attentiveness towards something other than oneself:
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as I do – that is enough, the rest follows of itself. (Gravity and Grace 108)
In both instances, the subject’s attention is directed outwards, away from the self. In the case of the poet, “something real” forms the object of his or her gaze, something external to the self. Likewise, the person performing a compassionate act fixes his or her attention on something other than the self: in this case, another human being. It is the consent to focus one’s attention on something other than oneself that is the precondition for both the creation of poetry and acts of love. This integration of Weil’s poetics and ethics reveals the cohesiveness of her thought as explored to this point. Poetry, as Weil conceives it, has value in its role as metaxu. It draws one’s attention towards the beauty of the world, and thus towards the divine. The same attention required to contemplate works of art is needed if one is to perform an act of compassion towards one’s fellow human beings, and is also required by the poet in the act of creation. The common thread that unites each of these actions is the ability of poetry to direct one’s attention towards the beauty of the world and thus to draw one into a closer encounter with the divine. This process is clarified in Weil’s definition of art:
Art is an attempt to transport into a limited quantity of matter, modelled by man, an image of the infinite beauty of the entire universe. If the attempt succeeds, this portion of matter should not hide the universe, but on the contrary it should reveal its reality to all around. (Waiting on God 106)
The central concerns of Weil’s poetics are given expression in her play, Venise Sauvée. In her analysis of Venise Sauvée ,Gabriella Fiori identifies clear links between the themes that emerge in this tragedy and in Weil’s philosophical and political writings (Simone Weil 187). The pivotal point in the play occurs as the hero Jaffier decides to betray his compatriots rather than to take part in their plot to destroy the city of Venice. As Fiori notes, this decision emanates from a moment of attentiveness on the part of Jaffier, whose gaze is caught by the beauty of Venice as he stands at the top of a bell tower looking down at the city (Fiori 185). Here, Jaffier displays Weil’s “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention” (Simone Weil: an Anthology 91-2). As has been discussed above, the contemplation of beauty is one of the things that can cultivate this form of attention. Beauty, Weil writes, “feeds only that part of the soul that gazes” (Simone Weil: an Anthology 92). The particular form of desire that beauty arouses is focused on looking rather than possessing. We desire what is beautiful, but what we desire is that the beautiful thing should continue to exist as it is. Desire thus directed is “gradually transformed into love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention” (Simone Weil: an Anthology 92). This is the quality of attention Weil bestows on her hero, who is so captured by the beauty of the city he is about to destroy that he chooses to save the city rather than himself. Jaffier’s actions illustrate Weil’s own poetic employment of the concept of metaxu. The beauty of Venice captures Jaffier’s attention, drawing his gaze towards the city and its inhabitants. This moment of attention results in a concrete act of love towards Venice and the Venetians that ultimately saves the city from destruction. However, there is a price to pay: Jaffier’s act of mercy results in his own suffering and in the deaths of his comrades (Fiori 186). All the qualities of metaxu are present in Weil’s tragedy: it is the beauty of Venice, and Jaffier’s consent to focus his attention on it, that results in his decision to act in a way that will ensure the survival of the city, even at great personal cost.
Weil’s concept of metaxu allows for the development of a comprehensive vision of how literature may be able to inspire hope. This vision addresses the dilemma that Camus recognised in movements fighting for revolutionary change, when the means become less important than the hoped for end. In the hope generated by metaxu, the means (the metaxu themselves) are of central importance. Beauty plays a key role; not only does it attract one’s attention away from the future towards what actually exists, it also reveals the existence of a power above and beyond force. Literature, in revealing the beauty of the world, can serve as metaxu, directing the reader’s attention beyond the work itself to the divine. This process is akin to Camus’ moment of creative insurrection: a rejection of the supremacy of force and an opening up of new possibilities for joyful, creative engagement in the present.
Notes
1 Portal of the Mystery of Hope 69.
2 The Rebel 268.
3 Aronson suggests that the split between Sartre
and Camus was not as a result of “individual idiosyncrasy”, but
because they
came to ‘incarnate’ the world-historical conflict between two of the century’s major ideological antagonists. Although Camus was never a partisan of capitalism and Sartre was never a Communist, these two antagonists wound up representing far larger forces than themselves. (Camus and Sartre 5)
4 In light of this, Sartre criticized Camus’s “clean hands” approach towards violence, suggesting that: “[it] is incumbent upon the writer to judge the means not from the point of view of an abstract morality, but in the perspective of a precise goal which is the realization of a socialist democracy” (What is Literature? 214).
5 Camus was not the only critic of Sartre’s call for committed literature. Theodore Adorno also addressed the question of commitment, suggesting that, “[the] sort of works that try to free themselves from fetishism by siding with dubious political interventions find themselves regularly enmeshed in a false social consciousness because they tend to oversimplify, selling out to a myopic praxis to which they contribute nothing but their own blindness” (The Adorno Reader 244). For Adorno, “[no] work of art can be true in social and political terms unless it is true in its own terms as well” (The Adorno Reader 262).
6 For Camus, this presented a problem that could only be reconciled by the willingness of a rebel to accept his or her own death in response to taking the life of another (The Rebel 246).
7 Camus identified a parallel between artistic creation and the political uprising of the oppressed: “the artist’s rebellion against reality, which is automatically suspect to the totalitarian revolution, contains the same affirmation as the spontaneous rebellion of the oppressed” (The Rebel 224).
8 Rebecca Solnit addresses the question of a present-oriented hope from an activist’s perspective in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, published in 2006. She identifies a shift in contemporary revolutionary movements away from a focus on ideology towards an “antidoctrinal” approach: a rejection of “static utopia in favor of the improvisational journey” (104). She suggests that in revolutionary movements such as these, in which the means take precedent over the desired ends, “hope is no longer fixed on the future; it becomes an electrifying force in the present” (108). These ideals, she suggests, are typified by the Zapatistas, the indigenous revolutionary movement in the Chiapas mountains of Mexico, who do not simply demand change, but embody it (35). The Zapatistas are described by Julio Moguel, editor for the Jornada del Campo and Economia Informa, as “a source of inspiration and of living hope” (Cecena “Mexican Civil Society and the EZLN” 41). Juana Ponce de León, editor of Subcomandante Marcos’s selected writings, Our Word is Our Weapon, suggests that the vision of the Zapatistas offers a “unique proposal for social change: to create a truly democratic space where new political possibilities can be debated and advanced” (xxiii). In Marcos’s story “Making the Bread Called Tomorrow”, hope is found in the present: in the sharing of pain, the joy of creating puppet shadows during a long sleepless night, the baking of bread in the morning (Our Word is Our Weapon 389). The title of one of his speeches proclaims: “Tomorrow Begins Today” (Our Word is Our Weapon 107). Marcos’s stories and speeches have been distributed throughout the world, and have been instrumental in inspiring new ways of resisting oppression.
9 Pages 182-183.
10 Weil and Camus both studied under Jean Grenier and Alain, and were deeply influenced by their studies of the ancient Greeks: it is for these reasons, among others, that Dunaway suggests that, although The Rebel may have been influenced by Camus’s reading of The Need for Roots, the similarities between these two writers “can best be attributed to commonality of interests and sources” (“Estrangement and the Need for Roots” 41-42).
11 Dunaway suggests that the “goal of Camus’s protagonist is always to be at one with the cosmos, in harmony with his universe”, and draws a parallel between this desire and Weil’s concept of rootedness (“Estrangement and the Need for Roots” 36). Examining Camus’s writings on rebellion and the novel illuminates this aspect of his work. Camus suggested that the novelist alters reality in order to unify it within the confines of the novel. The focus on seeking after unity recurs throughout The Rebel, and is the major point on which Camus bases his assertion that artistic practice embodies the key elements of rebellion. Every person, according to Camus, seeks to find ways to understand the world, and their place within it. This search is primarily one for unity. The value of the novel is found in its ability to give form to experiences that, in reality, have no fixed shape, no limits. It presents a reality that we recognise, but that has been altered in such a way as to give life a form and meaning it lacks in our day to day existence (The Rebel 229). In this way, Camus argues, novels are able to express humanity’s greatest desires: “[t]he world of the novel is only a rectification of the world we live in, in pursuance of man’s deepest wishes” (The Rebel 228). In response to our hopes for a better world, the novel offers us a form and unity that our present lives lack. This, for Camus, is precisely what humanity is seeking:
bq. “…man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified” (The Rebel 228). Having linked his concept of rebellion with creativity, Camus separates his ideas of literary value from those of both moralists and formalists, and states that the novel actually indicates a “metaphysical need”: the desire for unity (The Rebel 229).
12 This uprootedness, Weil believed, was largely as a result of the fact that “after being bemused for several centuries with pride in technical achievement, we have forgotten the existence of a divine order of the universe. We do not realize that labour, art and science are only different ways of entering into contact with it” (Oppression and Liberty 168).
13 For a more comprehensive study of these ideas, see Jim Grote’s article “Prestige: Simone Weil’s Theory of Social Force”.
14 Weil drew a distinction between force and justice: “Force is not a mechanism for automatically creating justice. It is a blind mechanism which produces indiscriminately and impartially just or unjust results, but, by all the laws of probability, nearly always unjust ones” (The Need for Roots 240).
15 Quoting a passage from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which describes the supremacy of force over weakness, Weil asserted that Hitler’s ideas were not so far from the ideology underpinning western civilization as a whole (The Need for Roots 282). She pointed out the absurdity in Hitler’s argument that the “circular trajectories” of the planets reveal that force reigns supreme. “How should blind force be able to produce circles? It is not weakness which is the docile servant of force. It is force which is docile to eternal Wisdom” (The Need for Roots 282).
16 Eric O. Springsted, in his thesis examining the Platonic influence on Weil’s concept of mediation, notes that “[the] term μεταξ is a Greek adverb or preposition meaning ‘intermediary’ or ‘between’, although Weil uses it as a noun, variously singular or plural. […] It, therefore, appears to be a shorthand term of her technical sense of ‘intermediary’” (Springsted Christus Mediator 293).
Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Camus, Albert. Caligula and Other Plays. Trans. Henry Jones, Stuart Gilbert and Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
—-. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1984.
Cecena, Ana-Ester. "Mexican Civil Society and the Ezln: Interviews with Adriana Lopez-Monjardin, Carlo Manzo and Julio Moguel." Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War. Ed. Midnight Notes Collective. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2001. 21-41.
Dunaway, John M. "Estrangement and the Need for Roots: Prophetic Visions of the Human Condition in Albert Camus and Simone Weil." Religion and Literature 17.2 (1985): 221-37.
Fiori, Gabriella. Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography. Trans. Joseph R. Berrigan. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Grote, Jim. "Prestige: Simone Weil’s Theory of Social Force." Spirituality Today 42.3 (1990): 217-32.
LeBlanc, John Randolf. Ethics and Creativity in the Political Thought of Simone Weil and Albert Camus. Studies in Political Science. Vol. 16. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.
Miles, Sian, ed. Simone Weil: An Anthology. London: Virago Press Ltd., 1986.
Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
O’Connor, Brian, ed. The Adorno Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000.
Péguy, Charles. Portal of the Mystery of Hope. Trans. David Louis Jr. Schindler. London: continuum, 1996.
Ponce de Leon, Juana, ed. Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcommandante Marcos. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
Royal, Robert. "The Literary Value of Hope: Péguy’s Porche Du Mystère De La Deuxième Vertu." Play, Literature, Religion: Essays in Cultural Intertextuality. Ed. Virgil Nemoianu and Robert Royal. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992. 159-84.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Lucifer and the Lord. First produced in Paris in 1951. Trans. Kitty Black. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1952.
—-. What Is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1950.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York: Nation Books, 2006.
Springsted, Eric O. Christus Mediator: Platonic Mediation in the Thought of Simone Weil. American Academy of Religion Academy Series. Ed. Carl Raschke. Vol. 41. Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1983.
Sprintzen, David A., and Adrian van den Hoven, ed. Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation. New York: Humanity Books, 2004.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Trans. Emma Craufurd. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987.
—-. Oppression and Liberty. Trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1972.
—-. Selected Essays 1934-43. Trans. Richard Rees. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
—-. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. Trans. A.F. Wills. London: Routledge Classics, 2002.
—-. Waiting on God. Trans. Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Previous Article | Next Article