Simone Weil. Per una decostruzione religiosa del soggetto moderno

[Machine translation] The book identifies in Simone Weil's thought the main lines of a project of religious deconstruction of modern subjectivity, which is presented as a demystification and unveiling of the deceptions on which it was constituted and strengthened. And it is precisely from the concept of force that the examination of the first essay begins (Dynamics of Deception in the Subject of Modernity), which follows the process with which the modern subject originates, based on power and on a lexicon of violence and empire: proclaiming itself something else from nature, the ego relates to it by dominating it; a pattern that, from the natural plane, is then replicated at the socio-political level, since the domination of man over man is governed by the same logic that chains it. But the exercise of force is nothing more than illusion and (self) deception: force is a mechanism, as such uncontrollable; in addition, its exercise, born with the intention of freeing itself from an external need, in turn generates another constraint: a fetishism or an idol of freedom. This is how the origin from which force derives its strength is configured: the free will that produces the illusion of a power that the subject masters, being in reality subject to it. With respect to unlimited arbitrariness, the lesson of the limit imparted by nature imposes a need, in which obedience to free oneself from that slavery that was deceptively defined as freedom. With respect to the hypnotic fascination of force, it is necessary to turn to what is powerless and untouched by force: love, which opens up a relationship alien to the logic of domination. , The political theme crosses the reflections proposed in the second essay (The Sacred and the Polis), where the analysis focuses on the symbol-idol relationship. Some of the most famous Weilian theses are discussed here, which attribute sacredness not to the person or to the community, but to the protection of the movement of the human being towards good, which can illuminate the way to concrete worldly action. This is against an idea of a nation that absolutizes the collective, idolizes the people, and that flattens the transcendent over immanence, canceling that distance that preserves its vitality. Here, the interpretations that attribute theocratic or ethocratic drifts to the Weilian political project on the one hand, or paternalistic-authoritarian tendencies on the other, are questioned. , The theme of the sacred and the good is explored in a theological key in the third essay (L'arbre qui se couvre de fleurs), in which the theme of original sin crosses the question of the free will and the link between freedom and limitation and necessity, bringing into focus new nuances. The act of force that originates from a stretching of the limit is now configured under the category of sin, expressed in the Edenic episode contained in Genesis. From this reading, a reflection that is not so traditional begins: diabolical temptation — “you will be like God” — is literally perversion, which does not deceive so much about the promise, as about the ways in which to achieve it: in order to look like God, it is not necessary to act in view of an acquisition of power, but reflecting the creative act through which the Creator gave rise to the world. Influenced by some cabalistic currents (Tzimtzum), Weil conceives in the chenotic portrayal of God the inspirational model to which human action must rely in order to strive for that divine likeness that the temptation of the serpent has diverted in the direction of a logic of power and domination. This is the key starting from which the last essay (Eradication and religious deconstruction of the modern subject) introduces the theme of the Weilian “impersonal”: distinguishing an uprooting “from outside”, the result of external and violent action, from an uprooting “from within”, which depotentiates the ego without destroying it, it becomes possible for the human being to root himself in a more real good than being. The themes of retraction return, of leaving space for the advent of good, the only source of the sacred, which constitutes the decentralized center of a subject who has renounced his absolute. , Simone Weil traces in authentic religiosity - which is concrete, lived and practiced spirituality - that paradoxical logic capable of destabilizing every form of human power and of counteracting its tendency to occupy the center of reality. This shows the deconstructive value of a category — that of the religious, in fact — that is too often superficially downgraded to undergo deconstructive analysis rather than to inspire it. In the deconstructive process of a hypertrophic subjective, the possibility, unfulfilled and waiting, of its authentic link with the supernatural remains open. The result is a different understanding of the history of subjectivity and therefore of its potential: an alternative path of regeneration, for another story that never ceases to flow, intertwined, into the first.