An excerpt from Against Interpretation
Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBook quotes Susan Sontag on Simone Weil:
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.
What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters "on the knees of his heart"—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kliest's plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction. [Read More]
Susan Sontag, 'Simone Weil'
in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
1 Comments:
After picking up ‘Against Interpretation and Other Essays’ and reading Sontag's view of Simone Weil, I was again disappointed. I find it interesting that most articles I’ve read about Weil focus on her religious views including affliction (something which people seem to have a hard time understanding-perhaps this is what, in part, Benjamin was lamenting when he was compiling the Arcades Project) these do not supersede Weil's core ideas or Truths on subjects like liberty and oppression or what she termed as the needs of the soul, which are suppose to help people understand human nature and act with kindness and compassion. But no one is interested in hearing about ethics or obligation to others because that doesn’t fit the materialist, neo-Darwinian view of human nature (e.g. the selfish gene angle). Which, for me, is a sad state of affairs – I feel obliged to state that I don’t adhere to any religion, but I do think something is going on beyond human understanding.
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