Decreation and the ethical bind: Simone Weil and the claim of the other

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Vulnerability of Precious Things : "La Personne et le sacre"
Chapter 2: Uncommon Measure : "L'Iliade ou le poème de la force"
Chapter 3: Stillness and the Bond of Love : Venise sauvee
Chapter 4: Unfinished Obligation : Venise sauvée and La Folie du jour
Chapter 5: The Extravagant Demand of Asking Nothing : Destitution and Generosity in "Autobiographie spirituelle" and La Connaissance surnaturelle
Chapter 6: Empty Petitions : The Last Letters of Simone Weil
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

In Simone Weil’s philosophical and literary work, obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: the other’s self-affirmation and one’s dislocation; what one has and what one has to give; a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand implied by asking nothing. The other’s claims upon the self—which induce unfinished obligation, unmet sleep, hunger—drive the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality at the heart of this book.
Decreation and the Ethical Bind is a study in decorative ethics in which self-dispossession conditions responsiveness to a demand to preserve the other from harm. In examining themes of obligation, vulnerability, and the force of weak speech that run from Levinas to Butler, the book situates Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech articulate ethical appeal and the vexations of response. It elaborates a form of ethics that is not grounded in subjective agency and narrative coherence but one that is inscribed at the site of the self’s depersonalization.

https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823275250/decreation-and-the-ethical-bind/