Decreation and the Ethical Bind

Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other

Yoon Sook Cha

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780823275274
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Simone Weil's philosophical and literary work, obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: the other's self-affirmation and one's own 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 decreative 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.

CHAPTER 1

The Vulnerability of Precious Things

“La Personne et le sacré”

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.

—Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce

In vulnerability, therefore, lies a relation to the other that causality does not exhaust, a relation anterior to all affection by the source.

—Emmanuel Levinas, “Sans identité”

In her essay “La Personne et le sacré,” Simone Weil describes self-dispossession as a passage from the “person” to the “impersonal”—a passage that would, on its face, seem to negate the very basis of relationality between oneself and the other. But it is precisely there that a relationship to the other is said to emerge.1 “All those who have penetrated the domain of the impersonal,” Weil writes, “encounter there a responsibility toward all human beings. That of protecting in them, not the person, but all that corresponds in the person to the fragile possibilities of passage into the impersonal. It is for them, foremost, that the call to respect the sacred nature of human beings must be addressed” (PS 19–20). Weil situates the relationship to the other where we are least likely to expect it, in the voiding of the “I”—a radical decentering of the ego that would allow the other to make contact with others or, finally, with God. This is not exactly to exempt oneself from contact with God or with others, but it is to withdraw so that one does not act as a “screen” in the way of this encounter. Of this figuration Weil observes in her notebooks, “my presence is indiscreet.”2 As the third, one is always a surplus figure, but that formulation also suggests that the rupture of intimacy between oneself and the other is in some sense necessary. Such a rupture is neither for the sake of a return to a supposed primary narcissism or an egoïc plenitude, nor for the reformulation of the “I” as a larger collective identity (“we”). Weil describes the withdrawal as a negative or recessive action characterized by stillness and attention. This posture of attention then becomes a kind of moral bearing or aptitude (to be distinguished from ability) in the context of the other’s exposure to harm and suffering.3

Throughout Weil’s writings, that exposure is signaled by his cry. Language is undone here. In “La Personne et le sacré,” Weil describes the cry as a stammering (balbutiement). Under repeated or sustained exposure to injury, one is eventually reduced to a “state of mute and uninterrupted groaning” (14). In the essay, Weil makes clear the semantic limitations of the cry of destitution and injury in her example of a man who stands accused and who must explain himself to a judge whose superior command of language, in turn, is employed to dismiss the empty (but not meaningless) stammering of the accused’s defense. According to Weil, the man is guilty of his destitution, indicated in socially tangible terms by the poverty of his language. Characterizing the appeal made by those similarly exposed to injury, Weil writes: “They are like someone whose tongue has been cut off and who has sometimes forgotten his infirmity. Their lips move and no ear perceives any sound. They themselves soon become powerless in the use of language because of the certainty of not being heard” (36).

To be so defenseless and powerless, to have at one’s disposal only the cry that disappears just as quickly into the folds of the senselessness and destitution from which it first emerged—how can such a cry be heard?4 One is addressed by this utterance that is not only below the level of semantic distinction and intelligibility but of appeal. Given the limits of semantic expression, how might an ethics modeled on self-dispossession—what I am calling “decreative ethics”—respond to the cry of the other, specifically to his demand that he not be harmed? For as Judith Butler reminds us, “a vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order to come into play in an ethical encounter.”5 Decreative ethics would require a recognition of the other’s demand, but any reception is surely vexed by its delivery. Under what conditions, then, might it be met? How might one perceive the demand when it appears to be no language at all, only the ruins of language, the cry but a hollowed reverberation? For the demand not to be harmed, like its delivery, is a negative, empty appeal.

Weil insists that the efforts of one who is addressed in this way must come from something other than his person, his ability, and his volition. In other words, it is not to one’s “person” that the appeal is made since it is not exactly one’s ability to respond that is addressed as such, nor is it the person upon whom the force of that cry is binding. Who or what, then, is responsible? Surely the vocative dimension of the cry assumes a direction, even as it does not exactly designate who or what is invoked. It could be said that the cry enacts its own limits in failing to designate or find an addressee. Or it might say something about the failure of address itself. But I would like to suggest that the cry of the other tells us something more fundamental about the other that cannot be fully recuperated by his address, but which is nonetheless signaled or enigmatically contained in the very openness of its addressee and the sonorous emptiness of the claims expressed in the cry. Just what measure of recognition is contained in this emptiness, and how, invoking Butler again, does it comport one beyond oneself?6 And how, in this ecstatic relation—a mode of being that, in Weilian terms, is impersonal and decreated—are we propelled toward an ethical relationality based on that very subject dislocation?

For Weil, that measure of recognition would also entail a recognition that one’s own will and desire are limited by material necessity and by the other himself who upends one’s sovereignty and self-complacency. The difficulty of recognizing these limits is exacerbated by the imagination, which allows one to forget or even negate those things that stand in the way of one’s volition and desire. “There is voluptuousness in everything that makes one forget the reality of obstacles,” writes Weil (13). Upon this view, the philosophical problem posed by the imagination is its nearly unlimited capacity to shore up the ego’s resources, particularly an egocentric perspective “characterized by illusions that place the subject at the center of space, time, value, and being.”7 Against this mode of voluptuous forgetfulness, I seek to show that an ethics issuing from self-dispossession would affirm an impartial order of things and so, too, would shift their relation to one’s own being. What emerges from this shift is a mode of seeing that is an expression of attention; it is a recognition of the reality of human existence, distinct from what that existence might provide for the ego. Recognition of that order is precisely where the ethical imposes itself as a demand by the other to attend to its permanent vulnerability to force and suffering.8 Such a recognition, in turn, compels one to not transfer one’s suffering onto others in the form of injury or in the form of what Weil calls “unlawful love,” which is characterized by a desire that destroys its object.

For my reading of harm and vulnerability I look closely at “La Personne et le sacré,” an essay that integrates some of the most important themes of Weil’s late thought: the precedence of obligations over rights, the constitution of justice, the nexus of obligation and physical and spiritual needs.9 Judith Butler’s reflections on vulnerability and injurability, which invoke Levinasian ethics, inform my reading of harm and one’s responsiveness to it.10 Specifically, I am trying to show how decreative ethics is an encounter with the other from which a responsibility to protect in the other “the fragile possibilities of passage into the impersonal” emerges. Certainly the passage of which I make use here, from Butler and Levinas to Weil, is not a transparent one, nor is it meant to collapse important distinctions between them. They are linked here by what I understand to be central to their respective ideas concerning human life: first, its primary vulnerability to others, and, second, an obligation to the other that emerges, precisely, from this vulnerability.

In her notebooks Weil writes, “The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence” (PG 181). What kind of ethics can be imagined from this vulnerability? What kind of ethical perspective—freed from the egocentrism of “the person”—can be developed from the kind of impersonal being Weil envisages? Would we find there a distinctly ethical expression of being, one that respects the alterity of the other so that it can neither be subsumed under nor mastered through one’s responsibility toward him? Would it compel us toward a mode of being profoundly open to the other, not because of any supposed social harmony (which can lead to idealization, in Weil’s view) or because the relationship is reciprocal (obligation, according to Weil, does not belong to an economy of equitable exchange or reciprocity), but because both the self and the other are, finally, vulnerable to harm?

THE PERSON AND THE IMPERSONAL

According to Weil, one’s most resilient store of energy is bound up with the “I,” which harnesses the energy it takes from the outside world and redirects it instinctively toward its own self-preservation. That is no less true in the case of one’s submersion in the collective, where that individual goal takes on a sovereign dimension. There the “I” is amassed under a greater power that holds in common its individual ambitions under the banner of a collective identity and entity, a totality that Weil variously calls “the social,” “social matter,” or “the great beast,” after Plato.11 The person cedes to the collective as naturally, writes Weil, as does the gram to the kilogram on a scale (PS 43). The collective is the example par excellence of an idealization that supplants the powerlessness of the individual person and legitimizes his interests (however speciously) through his membership. Alluding to Plato’s allegory of the cave, Weil writes that the collective is an ersatz good, the only earthly thing that can be taken as an end, “for it possesses a kind of transcendence in relation to the human person” (PG 248).12 Weil uses this concept of the collective to explain the aura and seductive power of National Socialism, going so far as to confess, “If at this moment I had before me a group of twenty young Germans singing Nazi songs in chorus, a part of my soul would instantly become Nazi.”13 The conspirators in her play Venise sauvée likewise dramatize the hyperbolic sway of the collective.14 Represented on one side by the Venetian citizens who enjoy a free, peaceful, and entitled existence, and on the other, by an uprooted and disenfranchised motley crew who conspire to overthrow the independent Venetian government for the Spanish Empire, the “we” is both the pinnacle and principle of the “I.”15 Their respective claims to get what they deserve is an eloquent enough articulation of the same dream of belonging, employing the notion of inalienable rights to support it. In this context, the restitution of rights is aimed at restoring a fundamental equilibrium; any violence exercised toward this end is understood to be its necessary means.

Weil insists upon the illusory nature of these claims without, however, losing compassion for the destitution that provoked them. Her point is not to dismiss disenfranchisement, forceful displacement, or suffering under brute or continued violence but to argue that the basis of their supposed restitution is itself imaginary: “When someone has harmed us, it creates reactions within us. The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. . . . The search for equilibrium is bad because it is imaginary. Revenge. Even if in fact we kill or torture our enemy it is, in a sense, imaginary” (48–49). The equilibrium is essential and the desire for equilibrium is real, but its object is false, the object being, finally, a self-aggrandizing and self-preserving “I.” Weil clarifies the link between self-preservation and harm experienced; the harm that one inflicts outwardly is proportional to the harm that one undergoes: “A hurtful act is the transference onto others the degradation that we bear in ourselves. That is why we are inclined to commit such acts as a way of deliverance. All crime is a transference of the harm in him who acts onto him who undergoes it” (135). One’s actions follow naturally from this principle: avoid harm and redirect the harm with which one is confronted. The above passage makes clear the relationship between the “degradation” we bear (a result of the loss of essential equilibrium) and the desire to be relieved of that suffering. To be relieved of it through its transference is a manner of “deliverance.” That deliverance comes in the form of hurting another—a false equation, according to Weil, since to inflict harm elsewhere is not to be truly rid of one’s own suffering. Under restricted circumstances that redirection still takes place, albeit at the level of imagination. The imagination works to compel present circumstances onto an imagined future where one’s desires are fulfilled (and so, one’s “destiny” or a “one day . . .”), and thereby alleviates some of the bitterness and reality of what is presently undergone. Nonetheless, the process of transference, as Weil understands it, gives at least the appearance of a solution through the displacement of suffering. Taken in the fuller context of Weil’s writings, that displacement is not necessarily, and certainly not primarily, a conscious activity but is rather an instinctive, even animal, gesture of self-protection and preservation. At issue here in Weil’s notion of the loss of essential equilibrium is the correlation between aggression and the inclination toward self-preservation.

Weil argues that the restitution of rights is additionally based upon an erroneous conflation between “being” and “having,” where self-preservation collapses into self-possession and where both constitute the “I,” according to this model. It follows that to be dispossessed of one’s rights also throws one’s being into question. And so, too, different registers and categories slide into one another: “the rights of man”—is this a political category or an ontological one? Natural or metaphysical? Contingent or absolute? It is precisely to the instability of their constitutive terms that Weil directs her critique of rights. In this regard, the claim of the conspirators in Venise sauvée illustrates a belief in the rights of man as an absolute and eternal principle. For Weil, this is an erroneous claim, and not the least because rights are circumstantial, vulnerable to changes in judiciary and cultural temperament, or simply because the notion of inherent rights (of one’s “human rights” and of the “respect for the human person”) is a historically modern idea. In a related work, Weil traces the notion of “the rights of man” to the French Revolution: “[The men of 1789] only recognized [reality] in the human realm. That is why they began with the idea of rights. But at the same time they wanted to postulate absolute principles. This contradiction caused them to fall into a confusion of language and ideas that is, for many, apparent in the present political and social confusion. The realm of what is eternal, universal, unconditioned is other than the one conditioned by facts, and therein lies different ideas related to the most secret part of the human soul” (EN 10). According to Weil, the error of French eighteenth-century rights-based political philosophy (represented by “Diderot and the Encyclopedists,” in Weil’s view) is that it bases what pertains to “the human realm” (and so, to what is finite) upon an absolute or eternal principle, the contradiction between the finite and the infinite giving rise to “political and social confusion.” In “La Personne et le sacré,” Weil appears to conflate the notion of the “rights of man” in this rights-based tradition with the account of human rights held by the personalist philosopher Jacques Maritain in his influential treatise The Rights of Man and Natural Law. Like other personalist philosophers before him, Maritain maintains that human beings are constituted by what he calls their person (la personne), an inviolable metaphysical center that grounds their natural rights and is the basis for natural law.16 Like his contemporary Emmanuel Mounier, Maritain criticizes the individualism of bourgeois liberalism, the collectivism of fascism, and the materialism of communism, which he viewed as impersonal, antihuman, and destructive. Urging a new concept of community with an explicitly Christian ethos, 1920s and 1930s French personalism sought to make the person the center of a new order of Christendom that would be both secular and lay.17 Here, too, Weil finds the distinction between the profane and historically contingent and the sacred to be problematically collapsed.

Weil maintains the distinction between the finite and the infinite without offering a solution to reconcile their difference. Insisting instead upon their differentiation, she argues that something other than rights must come to stand in for the human being’s relation to both realms. What is required is something that binds the human being to the human realm, without being essentially affected by the tides of circumstance, milieu, or power. The concept of rights fails according to this criterion because rights, in being contingent upon the person and so, vulnerable to variable social and political forces and shifting relations of power, are invariably circumscribed and conditioned by “social matter.” Against this, specifically challenging Maritain’s claim that “the notion of right is even deeper than that of moral obligation,” Weil insists that the notion of obligation is the only thing in the human realm that can be said to be eternally binding and unconditioned:18 “Obligation is not based upon any de facto situation, jurisprudence, customs, social structure, relations of forces, historical heritage, or a presumed historical orientation. For no de facto situation is able to create an obligation” (11). For Weil, an obligation cannot be created, as such. For just as much as the object of obligation is always the human being—and more prec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Abbreviations and Translations Used
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Vulnerability of Precious Things: “La Personne et le sacré”
• 2. Uncommon Measure: “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force”
• 3. Stillness and the Bond of Love: Venise sauvée
• 4. Unfinished Obligation: Venise sauvée and La Folie du jour
• 5. The Extravagant Demand of Asking Nothing: Destitution and Generosity in “Autobiographie spirituelle” and La Connaissance surnaturelle
• 6. Empty Petitions: The Last Letters of Simone Weil
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index