Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial

University of Missouri Press, February 1998. Hardcover. New. At the age of ten, Simone Weil suspected that the Versailles Treaty expressed the will to humiliate the defeated enemy. Some time later in a letter to the novelist Georges Bernanos, she marked this perception as the kindling of her political consciousness. According to professor Athanasios Moulakis, this 'element of hurt pride in Weil's fundamental experience, humiliation redeemed by humility, plays a prominent part in her thinking.' In <i>Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial</i>, he examines Weil's political thought as an integral part of a lived philosophy, linking it to her epistemology, cosmology, and personal experience. Weil's principal merit, Moulakis maintains, 'lies in the rediscovery of the essentially dramatic rather than procedural quality of human existence.' He charts the shifts in her reform philosophy, from 'liberation' to 'taking root,' basing his study on her <i>L'enracinement</i> (The Need for Roots). Weil's work abounds with such shifts and paradoxes. She sought earnestly for the place where truth and justice meet, locating it in the most elemental of human activities. Dissecting her political philosophy on the self, one discovers a strict asceticism: 'the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.' 266 pp.