KNOWING, TOTALITY AND POLITICS IN SIMONE WEIL AND ALBERT CAMUS

This essay interrogates the relationship of post‐Enlightenment epistemology to the conduct of modern politics through the thought of Simone Weil and Albert Camus. Contemporaries and fellow members of the French Resistance, Weil and Camus begin their critiques of modern politics with critiques of modern epistemology. They begin from different orientations to reality: Weil's is a God‐centered universe of “necessity,” while Camus's concern is to live with the “absurdity” of human existence. Their shared experience with the violence of modern politics, however, led them to similar conclusions: a calculative form of reason, presumably capable of unmasking the mysteries of (human) nature and positing totalizing explanations of human experience entails the perpetration of a destructive and dehumanizing violence on human existence and nature in general. Overcoming our epistemological prejudices is the first step to reclaiming politics for human beings.