Kathryn Lawson (Kingston) on “Decreation as Destruction or as Creation?”

The ethical implications of Simone Weil’s “decreation” are perhaps the most controversial of her work and it is difficult to determine if she is asserting a violent destruction of the human body or a creation of the human spirit as linked with God. Rowan Williams claims that Weil’s decreation requires the “I” to dissolve completely, thus collapsing the site of ethics, but Yoon Sook Cha argues that the ethical site opened in Weil is not the “I” but the “in-between”. I suggest that decreation holds both destruction / death as well as creation / life in order to enter a radical shift in perspective from dualistic to relational through the creation of a bridge between the I and God.