Love's Labor: The Relational Self in Simone Weil's Mystical-Political

This project, a new understanding of the manner in which justice and love intersect in the category of the mystical-political, develops out of the thought of twentieth-century French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Though her writing is notoriously difficult and demanding and her biography is not without controversy, her worth as an intellectual can in part be measured by the burgeoning cross-disciplinary influence of her thought: novelists, feminists, ethicists, political philosophers, and theologians have found in her work fruitful resources for reflection and constructive endeavors. This project is intended as a contribution to that literature, but it is also intended to bring Weil's ideas--particularly those concerned with the relational character of the human being and of the world in which humans are embedded--beyond the sometimes insular scholarship devoted to Weil's work and into a broader conversation that includes thinkers as diverse as Plotinus, Martin Heidegger, Catherine Keller, Luce Irigaray, and Hannah Arendt among others. For Weil, justice is coextensive with the presence of a love that is capable of identifying with someone different, while refraining from the kind of objectification or appropriation that so often accompanies such an identification. While she has been called a pessimist by some, she ultimately rejects the notion that justice is merely a pleasant delusion or a purely utopian ideal, arguing that it can be known 'experimentally.' Yet given the bleak realities of the world in which she was writing, she is forced to ask how, and to what extent, justice might find purchase in a world governed by a relentless and incomprehensible network of forces--something she calls 'necessity'--in partial continuity with the Platonic tradition. Indeed, by appropriating and transforming aspects of the Christian Platonic tradition in a way that permits her to elaborate a philosophical anthropology which understands the self as dynamic and relational, and by bringing this anthropology together with a thoroughgoing critique of technology's destructive power and a Marxian emphasis on the significance of labor, Weil provides important tools for the development of a persuasive, timely, and valuable model for linking the mystical and the political.