Thursday, June 2nd, 15.00 – 16.30, at Società Letteraria
Abstract:
“There is no other force on this earth except force[1]”. This is what Simone Weil wrote in her essay L’enracinement in which she spoke out against any optimistic and equally unfounded prophecy of progress and highlighted the most radical core of her philosophical thought, that of the importance of force as a mainspring in politics as well as in science, art and aesthetics in modern, contemporary times. By interpreting the past through the eyes of the present, Simone Weil underlines the fact that the violence of polemos is at the root of political, economic and social relationships even in times of peace and that modern-day wars, including revolutions, tread an even more senseless path than wars fought in the past.
With a clear view, which is neither reconciled nor vaguely pacifist, that rejects violence, her philosophy suggests the need for a radical change in perspective, from an interiorisation of the mechanisms of force which is always ‘collective’ and ‘suffered’ even when personally exerted, towards an internal detachment from force and deactivation of its devices while still supporting the need for and impersonal practice of an “inactive” action whose philosophical matrix lies in the Hindu teaching of the Bhagavad-Gīta and Gandhi.
[1]S. Weil, L’enracinement. Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain, Gallimard, 1949, p. 279 (translated into the English as The Need for Roots. Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind).
