Decreation and the Ethical Bind

In Simone Weils philosophical and literary work, obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: the others self-affirmation and ones own dislocation; what one has and what one has to give; a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand implied by asking nothing. The others claims upon the selfwhich induce unfinished obligation, unmet sleep, hungerdrive the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality at the heart of this book. Decreation and the Ethical Bind is a study in decreative ethics in which self-dispossession conditions responsiveness to a demand to preserve the other from harm. In examining themes of obligation, vulnerability, and the force of weak speech that run from Levinas to Butler, the book situates Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech articulate ethical appeal and the vexations of response. It elaborates a form of ethics that is not grounded in subjective agency and narrative coherence but one that is inscribed at the site of the selfs depersonalization.