3 - Of Colonialism and Corpses: Simone Weil on Force

Summary

Simone Weil was an unsettled thinker intent on disturbing preconceived categories and thinking in opposites. Kinsella’s essay invites us to re-read this compulsive outsider both for her theoretical contributions and for the ways in which she challenged conventional notions of what it meant to be an intellectual. Her asceticism, androgyny and complex religious identity made her a ‘lonely’ figure and prefigured her erasure as an international thinker. Kinsella roots Weil’s political philosophy in a penetrating analysis of colonialism. The despoliation of human beings and their environment lay at its core. Colonialism’s end could not be brought about by political means but on grounds that transcended politics and comprised an empathetic understanding of the degradation of people and land, an understanding she sought to achieve through the attempt to obliterate any collective identities in her person. Reading Weil invites readers to re-think the connection between international relations, empire and the spiritual.