“The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. To define force – it is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to...
“Most of human life”, Simone Weil wrote in her essay on The Iliad, “takes place far from hot baths”, but her own discomforts were mainly self-inflicted. She was born in Paris in 1909 into an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family. (…) Simone Weil was a gifted child, graduating first in...