The Animality of Simone Weil

Abstract

Personhood, language, and voice are heavily culturally overdetermined categories, particularly today, when they appear to many posthumanist critical eyes as saturated with anthropocentrism. But the answer is not to avoid or “overcome” them. The working hypothesis of this article is that, in its insistence on the primacy of the “radically other,” contemporary posthumanist political thought forecloses an important route to one of its own central goals: building paradigms for thinking about shared, multispecies worldings. The authors argue that the basis for such worldings is to be found in the concept of shared, quotidian affliction, following the work—including the work of both living and dying—of Simone Weil. The entry point into a nonhuman reading of Weil is Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel, I Love Dick, which here becomes a story at the threshold of the human-animal boundary, thus opening the impersonal realm of our shared zoetic life and its multispecies potential. Throughout, the authors play at something like an interchangeability of Kraus and Weil, as a performative response to both Weil’s call for the impersonal and Kraus’s complicated relationship to autofiction/autotheory.