Attention, Avoidance, and Tragedy: What Simone Weil Could Have Said About King Lear If She Had Read Stanley Cavell
Attention is central to Simone Weil’s ethics. Tragedy dramatizes what is for her the key human choice: whether to attempt false alliances with what she calls force, or whether to relinquish the illusion of alliances with force, accept our exposure to suffering (even the crushing suffering she calls...
| Published in: | Religion & literature |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Dep.
2020
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| In: |
Religion & literature
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| RelBib Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history NCB Personal ethics |
| Further subjects: | B
TRAGIC plays of William Shakespeare
B Crucifixion of Jesus Christ B PARADIGM (Linguistics) B Temptation B Cavell, Stanley, 1926-2018 B Weil, Simone, 1909-1943 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Attention is central to Simone Weil’s ethics. Tragedy dramatizes what is for her the key human choice: whether to attempt false alliances with what she calls force, or whether to relinquish the illusion of alliances with force, accept our exposure to suffering (even the crushing suffering she calls malheur, or affliction), and interact with the world through attention, which is an openness to reality as it is rather than as we would like it to be. Stanley Cavell claims that the central tragedy in King Lear is the avoidance of love, and that it is the fear of exposure that motivates Lear’s avoidance of love throughout the play. Put into Weilian terms, avoidance is a failure of attention. For Weil, unlike Cavell, love always originates with God. Avoiding love is thus avoiding God. In her passionate discussion of the pressure and temptation of force in human life, Weil deepens Cavell’s reading of Lear: though he does not put it this way, Cavell’s reading shows that avoidance inevitably leads to tragic, futile identifications with force. Cavell’s terms in reading Lear map surprisingly well onto a constellation of terms in Weil: attention, force, necessity, and affliction. These terms give us an outline of what Weil saw as the nature and purpose of human life. Expanding Weil’s reading of Lear along the lines of Cavell’s reading is thus an opportunity to form a vivid and powerful picture of the heart of Simone Weil’s philosophy. |
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| Item Description: | Die Hefte mit der Zählung 51.2020,3 und 52.2021,1 sind als Doppelheft erschienen |
| ISSN: | 2328-6911 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/rel.2019.0051 |