The project “Sacred Tropes” explores micropolitics of reading, i.e., the transformational promise in practices altering the way one is reading oneself and world. Here, I focus on the writings of Simone Weil and her concept of lecture. Against this backdrop, I apply traditional techniques of tropological exegesis. The umbrella term ‘tropology’ historically summons practices in different religious traditions that apply a performative hermeneutics of sacred text: This is, the meaning of divine text discloses reality in the way text affects, is lived out, and turns out embodied in the reader’s life and history. Considering Simone Weil’s transformational concept of lecture, I investigate the relationship between, on the one hand, textual shifts in meaning when applying sacred tropes, and, on the other hand, performative shifts in action when exercising tropological exercises. I argue that, for Simone Weil, applying sacred text, especially biblical tropes, provides textual instruments to shift thought in a way to encounter reality in human life aiming at the sacred as the fugitive concreteness in everyday life rather than an abstract concept of God.

Some shreds in the process of growing into a conceptual rag rug:

The scriptural exercise of philosophy demonstrates how tropes often function both as a rhetoric figures in the text and a performative tool at work in the reader’s life. Likewise, Weil’s application of the Platonic trope μεταξύ serves both as a trope with new meaning in her philosophical writing and provides a distinctive theory of what I call “tropology ”. Philippe Quéau explains this relationship of μεταξύ and tropology at work in the reader’s life in the following way:

Les tropes constituent la version rhétorique des déplacements topologiques. Le mot même de déplacement, essentiellement topologique, évoque aussi la métaphore figurativement. Réciproquement, l’étymologie du mot métaphore est liée au transport, comme on a vu […] or la pensée métaphorique n’est pas sans analogie avec la pensée métaphysique. La science de métaphores, comme la théologie, tente de révéler quelque chose malgré le voilement inhérent à cette révélation même. On ne peut nommer l’ineffable, on ne peut que « tourner » autour de lui … ou se déplacer par rapport à lui. C’est le sens premier du mot « trope ». La métaphore, comme déplacement, est image elle-même de la procession de toute âme vers de divin. Comme disent les maîtres mystiques, l’homme doit ne ressembler à personne, c’est alors qu’il est semblable à Dieu.

In Graeco-Roman antiquity, τρόπος combines the meanings of changing/turning (from one reading to another: towards something/someone) and the meaning of the way of living one’s life/moral orientation. Furthermore, the Nouvelle Théologie and its relation to the monastic practice of lectio divina, an influential movement in the 20th century Weil reflected upon, reintroduced the lecture tropologique as one of the four senses of a sacred texts; traditionally the interpretation in love, the moral sense that demands action. In nuce, tropology introduces performative and relational hermeneutics under the auspices of the claim of the other (turning toward someone/something).
Against this methodological backdrop, the concept of the scriptural exercise of philosophy relocates lecture within the monastic tradition of lectio divina (lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio) and redefines the latter as an intercultural and philosophical enterprise . Weil writes in this regard:

Méthode pour comprendre les images, les symboles, etc. Non pas essayer de les interpréter, mais les regarder jusqu’à ce que la lumière jaillisse […] Il faut d’abord les prendre d’une manière entièrement littérale, et les contempler ainsi, longtemps. Puis les prendre d’une manière moins littérale et les contempler ainsi, et ainsi de suite par degrés. Et revenir à la manière entièrement littérale. Et boire la lumière, quelle qu’elle [sic] soit, qui jaillit de toutes ces contemplations.

Following the spiritual techniques Simone Weil trained for, this study reconceptualises philosophy as a way of life that is, after all, practicing the lecture tropologique of textual artifacts intensively filled with significance and a plurality of meaning. This approach was, among others, suggested by Richard Rotry in reference to spiritual exercises . In relation, Emmanuel Falque argues:

La tropologie fait du texte le lieu de ma propre transformation, et mon monde n’habitera son monde qu’en cela seulement, en dernière instance, je deviendrai capable moi aussi de m’y retrouver.

In response, along with the notion of anthropology the study reassesses Simone Weil’s mystical experiences as tropology and locates them within the genealogy of mysticism in biblical exegesis, as demonstrated by Bernard McGinn:

Mysticism, understood as the search for the immediate presence of God in this life, remained bound to the Bible and the use of the Bible as it had in the period, I have called The Foundations of Mysticism.

It is not surprising in light of the originary entanglement of mysticism and monastic lecito divina that also Weil’s scriptural exercise of philosophy, after all, aims at the state of non-reading as many mystical authors understood the contemplatio of the lectio divina. Emmanuel Falque writes in terms of the tropological reading of scripture:

Vécu – ou la tropologie du texte ou de la pratique – n’importe donc pas, ou peu, au regard du déplacement et du dépaysement de ce qui fait mon égoïté et eu égard à sa propre altérité. C’est en réalité seulement en me détournant du texte comme médiation que je rejoindrai véritablement le texte comme « vécu » toujours inapproprié et lieu d’une paradoxale « intercorporéité ».

For Weil, non-lecture goes literally hand in hand with somatically unwriting herself into what she is reading. And this practice of (un-)writing is doing philosophy. Here, philosophy and scripture limit and supplement each other , especially in their mutual scrutiny of the conditio humana. Mohammed Arkoun puts this in the following way:

There is no way to find the Absolute outside the social, political condition of human beings and the mediation of language.

In augmenting philosophical investigations with discriminating sources of cultural and socio-historical contingency (=sacred text) the scriptural exercise of philosophy provides tropological ontologies of assemblage and constellation that unlock the hermetic methods of pure “unturned” thought, as Simone Weil puts it:

Les choses charnelles sont le criterium des choses spirituelles.

Drawing on sacred texts, Weil constructs a new “philosophical mythos”. On this account, she applies world-making scriptures, sacred texts, to serve as genealogical rooting and criticism to the transhistorical ground of philosophical knowledge production and vice versa. Against its backdrop she revaluates the present pluralism of ideas and sorts out meanings in a modern world of Gods without Gods. Her lecture créatrice is not far from rabbinic traditions:

In their explication of Scripture, the rabbis take words out of context, ignore grammatical constructions, delete, transpose, and add letters, divide single words into two smaller words, treat apparently regular words as acrostics, and interpret words in biblical Hebrew as if they were rabbinic Hebrew, Aramaic, or even Greek […] if an interpretation departs from the surface meaning of Scripture, that is because the surface meaning is only the superficial meaning. The real point of Scripture lies in the commentary, which is embedded in the text, a commentary that sometimes mocks the text upon which it comments.

Also Sara Ahmed has recently emphasised the phenomenological importance of directionality and orientation in tropological movements:

Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view.

Simone Weil’s tropological examination of sacred world-making texts, turning them towards philosophy and vice versa, pivots in a constitutive contradiction at the heart of the Christian biblical canon. Weil identifies a genealogically constructed rupture between a reading of sacralised nationalism in the Old Testament and the universally incarnated and crucified “word of beauty” in the New Testament:

L’essentiel, c’est que le mot de beauté parle à tous les cœurs.

Although fiercely criticising Old Testament passages, she never aims at a Marcionite redaction of the biblical canon. Instead, she uses its irreversible contradiction and applies it as a “self-queering” assemblage between violence and beauty. The paradoxical clash of (text-)cultures, of world-masking and world-making text entangled as one sacred scripture, radicalises itself to the furthest extent when Weil implements the scandalon of the crucifixion as the leading hermeneutical instrument of all of her self-world relationships.
In turning everyday labour into (religious) ritual Simone Weil exercises an epistemic renunciation of the (moral) realism without, yet paradoxically finding a way of orienting towards it: Herein, Simone Weil practices attention to the concrete claim of the other in light of sacred text:

L’Evangile contient une conception de la vie humaine, non une théologie … une lampe électrique … que j’en juge … en regardant quelle quantité d’objets est éclairée

Against this backdrop, Weil’s scriptural exercise of philosophy grows into impelling socio-political and ethical criticism with implications especially for the “big” tropoi (turn-outs) of “Christianity” and “Europe”:

La Bible, c’est la révélation traduite en social

Weil’s tropology serves as spiritual discernment that debunks tacit translations in “disorientedly reading” the sacred into the political and social sphere. A scriptural exercise of philosophy thus effectuates a new variant of criticism of religion , that is to say, a pessimist criticism of latently sacralised social conditions that engender a climate for suffering.