Simone Weil on Work, Oppression, and Emancipation
Description
This book makes a powerful case for returning to Simone Weil to reflect on the philosophy of work today. In the age of the Anthropocene, of AI, of automation, and of the crisis of meaning, this volume argues that we must think of work as something that is much more than an economic activity done for a wage. The problem of work, this volume argues, is thoroughly political. The book examines the meaning and organization of labour and the forms of oppression and suffering it can entail, from 1930s factories to the jobs of our contemporary world. It also explores the modes of attention and emancipation that are possible at work. Placing Weil in conversation with other thinkers (e.g. Marx, Fanon, Tronti, Bataille, Graeber), contributors analyze the challenges and possibilities of transforming work into a dignified activity.
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Persons
Pascale Devette is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. She is the co-author of Devenir inutile: Pour une philosophie politique de la démission (2025) and has published extensively on Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt.
Sophie Bourgault is Professor of political theory at the University of Ottawa. Former president of the American Weil Society, she is the co-editor of Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology? (2020), as well as eight other volumes on feminist ethics and care work.
Milan Bernard is a political theorist and a post-doctoral fellow at the Université de Caen-Normandie. He is a specialist of the thought of Hannah Arendt and of 20th century political thought.
Content
Chapter 1 A Method rather than a Theory for Considering Labour.- Chapter 2: Simone Weil and the Self-criticism of Marxism.- Chapter 3: It is through the effort to recapture the self that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world A Weilian reading of Frantz Fanon.- Chapter 4: Between Syndicalism and Catholicism. Simone Weil Marxism and the Catholic Worker Movement.- Chapter 5: Only Beauty can Save Us Simone Weil on Labour Affliction and Joy.- Chapter 6: Simone Weil Workers Inquiry Operaismo.- Chapter 7: Prelude to Precarit Simone Weils Inadvertent Feminism.- Chapter 8: How Much Against Your Will Under Pressure of a Harsh Necessity.- Chapter 9 : Weil and Bataille on the Sanctity of Labour.- Chapter 10: The redemption of the negative action a new metaphysics of labour.- Chapter 11: The Discreet Wearing out of Souls at Work Weil on Speed Humiliation and Slow Affliction.- Chapter 12: The Mystic of Labour The Spiritual Writings of Simone Weil in Dialogue with Process Theology to Imagine Labour as a Spiritual Exercise.- Chapter 13: A little pile of inert matter The Body in Simone Weil's Philosophy of Labour.- Chapter 14: Simone Weil and Karl Marx on Degrowth A Critical Reassessment.- Chapter 15: Impactful and Dignified: Simone Weil and David Graebers Shared Ideal of Work.- Chapter 16: Force and Intelligence in the Age of Systems Weil's Theory of Labour from Factory to Digital Capitalism.