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- Title
ATTENTION, AVOIDANCE, AND TRAGEDY: WHAT SIMONE WEIL COULD HAVE SAID ABOUT KING LEAR IF SHE HAD READ STANLEY CAVELL .
- Authors
Gehring, Stephanie
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
CAVELL, Stanley, 1926-2018; TEMPTATION; TRAGIC plays of William Shakespeare; WEIL, Simone, 1909-1943; CRUCIFIXION of Jesus Christ; PARADIGM (Linguistics)
- Publication
Religion & Literature, 2019, Vol 51/52, Issue 3/1, p1
- ISSN
0888-3769
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/rel.2019.0051