Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology? by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030484019
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Colonization is forced imposition, both concrete, e.g., in territorial conquest, and abstract, e.g., in the introduction of hierarchies (inferior/superior). After presenting the colonial problem as a problem of force, Weil turns to the question of how to improve the situation. “One of the ways that can be imagined,” she suggests, “is the birth of a movement of opinion in the colonizing nation against the appalling injustices imposed on the colonies.”51 Indeed, in a State that promotes ostensibly universal rights, “that proclaims an ideal of freedom and humanity,” “[i]t would seem easy to provoke such a movement of opinion.”52 But this is not the case, because States are never what they claim to be. She continues soberly: “Generosity hardly ever extends in any people as far as making an effort to discover the injustices committed in their name.”53 Revolt is a second possibility, but it is unlikely to succeed, she notes, and even if it did, it is likely that “constraint, exhaustion, and hunger” would remain “as great as under foreign domination.”54 Hence independence—“doubtless a good thing”—would be rendered “meaningless.”55 A third way, which Weil endorses, is “that the colonizing nations have an interest in the progressive emancipation of her colonies, and that she be conscious of this interest.”56

This third way, Weil admits, is an improbable solution, thwarted by “the ignorance in France concerning the facts of the situation.”57 Indeed, as she notes in the concluding part of the essay, the subjects of a State do not take as seriously what offends justice, as what threatens their personal security. She also acknowledges that her endorsed plan would be rejected by radicals. To the revolutionaries, this third way, this “solution,” “bears the indelible defect of reformism.”58 To the contemporary decolonial thinker, this “soultion” could be said to be even more problematic, bearing the defect of paternalism and gradualism, which militate against independence and liberation. Indeed, the philosopher who wants to think with Weil with a view toward decolonial efforts must reject the continual “not yet” that one can hear in her advocacy toward “partial emancipation”; for the Weil of the 1938 essay “New Facts,” “There is no question of suddenly making the colonies independent states.”59

In the final instance, I think Weil is instructive not in her prescribed reform but in her refusal to accept an aporetic posture that would dwell, and remain, in the difficulty of essaying another way. “Regarding the colonies,” she writes in a 1938–1939 fragment, “it is not sufficient to make do with a question mark.”60 What to bear in mind, then, when offering a response to the question of colonialism in and of my own predatory State? Writing in 1939, in an unfinished essay titled “Reflections on Barbarism,” Weil states: “I believe that the concept of force must be made central in any attempt to think clearly about human relations.”61 It is also in this essay that she writes, “[W]e are always barbarous toward the weak unless we make an effort of generosity that is as rare as genius.

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