Topologies

This chapter argues that Weil's overturning of Arendt's views is not limited to the judgment on Rome. The very Christianity that Arendt situates as the commencement of the drift toward the modern constitutes for Weil both its internal rampart and its principle source of contention simultaneously. Indeed, for Weil Christianity is the spiritual thread that allows modernity to continue advancing in light of its originary inspiration. This does not mean that the two interpretative horizons are openly contradictory. They even coincide at one point precisely in their severe judgment of historical Christianity, which, paradoxically, Weil blames for the de-Christianization of our times. However, their two perspectives diverge once again as Arendt observes that this phenomenon surely occurs because Christianity is lacking in mundane, public figures. In contrast, Weil believes that it is precisely Christianity's spirituality that makes it the unique, authentic “continuation” of Greece.

Principium and Initium

This chapter argues that Homer's originarity—the fact that he precedes even the beginnings of historiography—is what attracts the attention of both Arendt and Weil in relation to the event that he translates into verse. The event narrated in the Iliad is understood by both Arendt and Weil as what “comes before.” It is this inaugural character that obliges that they both address its phenomenology, meaning, and effect. This inaugural character is not only at the origin; it is the origin of our story. It is the origin of our story at least to the extent that it has assumed a truly political dimension. The event, in other words, opens up the time of politics and inevitably predetermines it. It is this bond between origin and politics—the political destiny of the origin but also the constitutive originarity of politics—that captures the attention of both thinkers, who had already made the polis the primary concern of their reflection.

In the Grip of Love

This chapter justifies a reading of Weil as a “combative” thinker not only because she has always considered war to be “the main engine of social life” (Intuitions Pré-Chrétiennes, 76), but also because of something more deeply rooted in her thought and in her life that transmits the tone and language of an uninterrupted battle directed primarily against herself. Even in her most passionate phase of pacifism, this is something that prevented her from “renouncing the struggle which, according to Heraclitus, is the condition of life,” therein revealing life's internal movement. Love is author of the most complete harmony since it unites the most contrary of contraries. This also allowed her to affirm that: “war itself, especially as conducted in the old days, stirs man's sense of beauty in a way that is vital and poignant” (Waiting for God, 106).

Forces

This chapter argues that the Iliad constitutes the most perfect example precisely because nothingness can be perceived there in all its meaningful resonance. Weil's definition of the poem as the “picture of God's absence” (Notebooks, Vol. II-A, 405), as “misery of the man without God” (Notebooks, Vol. I- C, 229) should not be interpreted merely in terms of lack. It should be interpreted in the sense of the powers that fill and inhabit, of the plenitude that installs itself most optimally in the absence of God, or, rather, as that absence itself in its most terribly “positive” expression, as the content of Abandonment: “The Creation is an abandonment. In creating what is other-than-Himself, God necessarily abandoned it” (First and Last Notebooks, 103). It is in such abandonment that the dominium of force emerges and imposes itself. The Iliad gives the most complete expression to this dominium.

The Third Origin

This chapter argues that the double operation involving the urbanization of originary conflict and the “heroization” of political action is not yet sufficient to bridge the principle gap between polemos and polis, or between violence and power, at least in reference to the way the Arendt herself radicalizes the opposition. Unless a third point of reference, a third archetype, or a third origin intervenes it is impossible to confer stability and duration upon a politics that is still overly exposed to the wound generated by originary scission. Arendt finds her last pole star—a third point capable of uniting the scene of origin in a perfect triangular form—in Rome. This is the third origin that fuses all the flotsam and jetsam that distances Troy from Athens, thereby consolidating a broader originary figure finally liberated from all residues of violence.

Beginn, Anfang, Ursprung

This chapter focuses on the two distinct and even contradictory readings of origin that lie in pursuit of each other in Arendt, alternating and intertwining throughout the entirety of her work. The first is of a deconstructive nature, while the second is constitutive. In order to identify them separately—and before turning to the antonymic point at which they converge—the chapter returns to two authors who were both very much present in Arendt's formative years. The first is Nietzsche and, more specifically, the “genealogist” Nietzsche, who was considered by Foucault to be the first to deconstruct the sacred conceptualization of origin. The second is Walter Benjamin, to whom Arendt dedicated one of her most forceful essays, the “Gnoseological Foreword” to Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama.

Truth

This chapter considers the importance of Arendt and Weil's interpretations of the Homeric world, and of The Iliad in particular. This is the case because it is a question to which they both return on a number of occasions, as if the return itself were decisive for the formulation of their own categories. But, above all, it is the case because their interpretations uncover the phenomenon of “concordant dissonance” or of “dissonant concordance.” Homer also evokes another word, which binds them in an affirmative sense. This is the question of the justice, impartiality, or equity of the poet who unites both victors and vanquished in light of the dignity of two adversarial peoples.

Partitions

This chapter considers the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. It argues that each one thinks in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light, in the silence of the other's voice, in the emptiness of the other's plenitude. To think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought. It is precisely this “remainder,” this “boundary,” this “partition” that divides while joining and separates while combining that is the object of the present analysis. The chapter then turns examines the question for which the two thinkers appear to be most distant: the relation between action and work, between praxis and poiesis, between the political sphere and the social sphere.

The Final Battle

This chapter presents one final twist, acute divergence, or digression that remains in the relation between Arendt and Weil's notions of heroism. This twist originates in one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: “The heroic consists in doing a great thing (or in not doing a thing in a great fashion) without feeling oneself to be in competition with others before others. The hero always bears the wilderness and the sacred, inviolable borderline within him wherever he may go” (Nietzsche, Human, 391–92). The image of the wilderness here—which Arendt's hero struggles to constrain—provides significant insight into Weil's notion of heroism.

In Common

This chapter considers Homer's perspective as he oversees a scenario that comprises both Trojans and Achaeans. Here, there is something that goes beyond the often mentioned “impartiality” of Homer's relation to the two adversaries; something that seems to approach an impersonality in which Weil's notion of “reading” (First and Last Notebooks, 337) loses its subject and adheres to the object, to the point of disappearing into it, of becoming “non-reading”: “It is a question of uprooting our readings of things, of changing them, so as to arrive at non- reading” (Notebooks Vol. I- D, 312). It is only from this point—which does not coincide with any particular perspective and is, rather, an absence of perspective—that the author of the Iliad can frame the scene on the basis of the invisible circle that unites all combatants.