The geometric rigor of the epic: “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force”, by Simone Weil

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the hypothesis of poetic thought in the work of Simone Weil, especially from the reading – and translation – of classical Greek poems (Electra, Antigone, Iliad). While this possibility does not exactly come from the theory of literature, we must look into its poetic clarification about union issues on proletariat work, which were linked by Weil with a certain decay of values in a capitalized society. The crisis of a social order results in Weil also a crisis of ideals, therefore of morality, a fundamental subject in the epic pólemos – the war – and in the tragedies of Greek poems. In this context, her approach to epic in L’Iliade ou le poème de la force (1941) reveals, in addition to a historical and political sense –as Hannah Arendt read–, another connection between the poetic and the ethical. Precisely, Weil discovers in this nexus a peculiar aesthetic sensibility, when she places Aristotelian mimesis as a poetic correlate of another form of representation of archaic Greek thought: geometry. In this way, in the Homeric poem, created for a representation that politically subscribes to an exemplary equality – as if the myth was still in balance in poetic logos’ tekné, of a kósmos that organizes the history of humankind – the proportion of actions virtuously converge with the rather ethical reverence of Greek heroes. Thus, Weil formulates a kind of hermeneutics in line with a geometry of poetic passions, particularly focused on the conception of force.