Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy: (Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion)

Offering new insight into the pertinence of Simone Weil's thought, this volume situates her in the Continental discourses which constituted her philosophical background, her milieu, and which frequently reflected her departures from her contemporaries. The book includes fresh critical perspectives on the philosophies of prominent twentieth and twenty-first century theorists like Foucault, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Agamben, and Ranciere.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction, Rebecca Rozelle-Stone / Part I: Transcendental and Embodied Phenomenology / 2. Weil's Boat: On Becoming and Being, Philip Goodchild / 3. Blanchot's Weil, Kevin Hart / 4. Decreation and the Creative Act: Simone Weil and Nikolai Berdyaev, Lisa Holsberg / 5. Attention and Expression: Prescriptive and Descriptive Philosophy in Weil and Merleau-Ponty, Kascha Snavely / Part II: Attentive Ethics / 6. Levinas and Weil: Ethics after Auschwitz, Robert Reed / 7. Compassion, Consolation, and the Sharing of Attention, Stuart Jesson / 8. Simone Weil and the Problem of Fatigue, Rebecca Rozelle-Stone / 9. Recreating the Creature: Weil, Agamben, Animality & the Unsaveable, Beatrice Marovich / Part III: Emancipatory Politics / 10. Simone Weil's Analysis of Oppression: From La Boetie to the Neoliberal Present, Lissa McCullough / 11. The Training of the Soul: Simone Weil's Dialectical Disciplinary Paradigm, a reading alongside Michel Foucault, Scott Ritner / 12."To love human beings in so far as they are nothing": Deracination and Pessimism in Weil, Anthony Paul Smith / 13. Weil and Ranciere on Attention and Emancipation, Sophie Bourgault / Index

About the Author :
Rebecca Rozelle-Stone is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Director of Women and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota. She is an active member of the American Weil Society and served as its President from 2014-2016. She is co-editor of The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later (2009) and co-author of Simone Weil and Theology (2013).

Review :
Rozelle-Stone (Univ. of North Dakota) set out to address a gap in the scholarship regarding Simone Weil (1909–43), and she succeeds admirably. The work of both well-known scholars and rising stars, the 12 essays in this remarkable volume consider Weil’s thought alongside Continental philosophy. Readers will appreciate the ways in which Weil is put in conversation with some of the 20th-century’s key thinkers—Blanchot, Agamben, Merlau-Ponty, et al. Interest in Weil’s thought has increased in recent years, and this volume will be warmly welcomed not only by Weil scholars but also by those interested in Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, political theory, ethics, and religious studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. For the first time in English, here is a commentary which, like Maurice Blanchot’s, refuses the consolation of hagiography and reads Weil as she read her contemporaries: with the unforgiving ‘indifference to ideas’ which is the true sign of fidelity. This volume does much more than place Weil in conversation with prominent ‘continental philosophers’. Thanks to Rozelle-Stone’s superb framing of the task, each author offers a timely intervention that tests the limits and possibilities of Weil’s complex thought. Students of Weil will certainly benefit, but so will (future) students of philosophy wherever their starting point. Rozelle-Stone is a gifted Weil scholar who has put together a beautiful collection of essays linking Simone Weil to several generations of continental philosophers. The volume’s contributors share a deep familiarity with thinkers and movements that belong in any serious conversation about Weil. They remedy a neglected area of scholarship and draw productive contrasts between Weil and her continental counterparts.