death | text | resonance – Simone Weil and Writing to(wards) Death

Confronted with situations of imminent extinction, philosophers and writers, rangingfrom Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Alejandra Pizarnik and many others, have articulated death in manifold ways: as the other night, the impossibility of ending, being-toward-death, experience of loss and grieving, existential premise of modernist melancholia, and poetics of silence and nothingness. In this context, Simone Weil (1909‒1943) has become particularly significant. Through her philosophical writing and political activism, Weil radicalized the instant of death as a focal point through which the vulnerable beauty of human existence asks to be considered in a new light. Weil’s handwritten notebooks document literary practices between excess and deprivation, producing visual assemblages of decreation, anorexia, and various forms of textual kenosis. In discussing the possible ways to articulate the ungraspable from different disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical traditions, our workshop will discuss literary, philosophical and theological forms of writing to(wards) death. Together with Simone Kotva (University of Cambridge) and Hartmut Rosa (University of Jena/Max-Weber-Kolleg), we will trace the movements of textual experiments that search for and attempt to approach that which we cannot understand but sometimes experience, that is, the infinite, the numinous, and the ineffable. Simone Weil’s texts will provide our workshop with a constant reference point, amid participants’ differing approaches of writing (to)wards death, darkness and existential uncertainty. Join us in our efforts to forge ahead on this errand on the edge.
Against this backdrop, we will confront and challenge contemporary questions raised by scholars in philosophy, sociology, economics and psychology about the nature of the proverbial “good life.” We will do this by entering into a transdisciplinary dialogue with Hartmut Rosa’s ‘Sociology of Our Relationship to the World,’ which raises questions about how far it is possible to ‘resonate’ with death and what particular functions literary practices assume in this context. In addition, we will attend to the role of the attention and human will in such endeavors, aided by Simone Kotva’s work on ‘Effort and Grace.’