Simone Weil

and Work in the Digital Age

OCT 25 | 3:00 - 5:00 PM

Toronto Metropolitan University, Layton Room, Oakham House, 55 Gould St., Toronto

All are welcome to this special roundtable on the theme of work with two distinguished Weil scholars. Please note that both papers will be distributed in advance and will not be read at the event. After highlighting their main ideas, our guests will be brought into conversation with each other on the common themes they address, guided by the moderator of this event, Diane Enns. A general discussion with attendees will follow. Refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP below.

A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

  • A.Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, Ph.D. is Associate Dean of Curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at the University of North Dakota. She earned her B.A. in philosophy at Birmingham-Southern College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Rozelle-Stone served as the President (2014-2016) of the American Weil Society, and she has co-edited The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, co-authored Simone Weil and Theology, edited Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy, and most recently authored A Very Short Introduction: Simone Weil. Aside from Simone Weil, her research interests include phenomenology, feminism, the ethics of attention, and the growing field of fatigue studies.

  • “Elastic Worker: Time-Sense, Courage, and the Paradox of Resilience”

    This essay considers Simone Weil’s experiences in factories and her social–political reflections on work, time and energy, in conjunction with arguments from theorists Melissa Gregg, Theodor Adorno and Sara Ahmed, to raise questions about supposedly humane interventions, including the cultivation of resilience, in the contemporary “flexible” workplace. The transition from time-sense in factory work at the turn of the century is examined, along with the growth of corporate time management ideologies and practices in the mid–late 20th century, and finally, the associated forms of disciplining resilience/elasticity in the worker that bring together certain notions of time, space and psychological investments.

Sophie Bourgault

  • Sophie Bourgault is associate professor at the School of Political Studies (University of Ottawa). Her main research gravitates around the following subjects: feminist theory; epistemologies of ignorance; social acceleration, gender and time poverty; communicative and deliberative dysfunctions in institutional settings (healthcare, education). In addition to being the author of many articles and book chapters on diverse figures in the history of ideas (e.g. Plato, Foucault, Gadamer, Arendt, Weil, Cavarero, Rancière), she is the co-editor of five volumes on care ethics and of one on the political thought of Simone Weil. She was guest co-editor for a special issue on gender, work and justice (for Politique et Sociétés), and guest co-editor for The International Journal of Care and Caring. She also has a forthcoming co-edited volume with Rutgers University Press (2024) on epistemic injustice and feminist ethics.

  • “The Discreet Wearing out of Souls at Work: Simone Weil on Speed, Humiliation and Affliction”

    This paper seeks to show the relevance of Simone Weil’s writings on work for contemporary political and social theory. More specifically, by drawing on Weil’s factory writings, I argue that Weil’s analysis of speed, humiliation and affliction is highly pertinent for reflecting upon the consequences of the increasingly ubiquitous recourse to digital tracking and monitoring tools by today’s employers. The paper also proposes to read Weil’s account of suffering and affliction in light of recent scholarship on “slow violence”. Inspired by Rob Nixon’s work, this scholarship is interested in forms of harm that are slow-paced, attritional, ‘out of sight’ and intimately tied to our (distracted) attention regimes. As I argue, Weil very lucidly described the paradox at the heart of many types of modern work: namely, that its fast pace causes the slow death of workers’ souls and bodies. The paper draws out the importance of Weil’s account of affliction for understanding the harms caused by new forms of digital domination in the twenty-first century workplace.

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