December 2011
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Portraits of Force
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force.”
It’s an essay on the role of force (i.e., coercive violence) in the Iliad — but Weil wrote it in 1939, so she wasn’t just writing about the Iliad. In the essay, she describes the centrality of coercion (in the form of violence, destruction, and enslavement) both to...