The Origin of the Political by Esposito Roberto;Binetti Vincenzo;Williams Gareth;

Author:Esposito, Roberto;Binetti, Vincenzo;Williams, Gareth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

8

FORCES

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 does nothing more than give the most complete—that is to say, the most transparent—expression to this dominium.1 It is a work of art because it does not veil its own reality. It is an eternal work because the reality represented therein, qua uninitiated and interminable, is eternal. Weil had “discovered” this even before she penned her great Homeric essay, written between 1938 and 1939, which, due to the outbreak of war and Jean Paulhan’s hesitations, could only see the light of day between 1940 and 1941.2 Weil’s discovery is evidenced in the fact that she had already expressed the structuring principle of this work in her letter to Georges Bernanos: “When you know it is possible to kill without risking punishment or condemnation, you kill” (Écrits, 223). Furthermore, the biographical and conceptual relation between her essay on the Iliad and the civil war in Spain is consciously explicated in the first Notebooks.3

However, the text that most closely serves as a prelude to the essay on Homer is probably the fragment, dated 1939, titled “Reflections on Barbarism”: “I do not think we can form clear ideas about human relations without emphasizing the notion of force, in the same way the notion of relation is located at the center of mathematics” (Ecrits, 64). Here the ideology of progress is criticized as much as its complementary ideology of decadence. This is developed in favor of an evaluation of force understood not as measurement but as a universal constant of, and invariable in, human nature. It is the same formulation as the one that would leave its mark in the essay on the Iliad: “For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and loveliest of mirrors” (“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 5). War is not the wound destined to cicatrize into the “regularity” of politics, but its ineliminable foundation. It is for this reason that “the reality of war is the most precious

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