Am ambivalent about Weil, as you probably know, and for the gnostic reason, though I haven't read a lot of her and I do love the Iliad essay. I didn't know that Iyer book existed. I remember him from the radical blog days in the mid-2000s but I never read his fiction back then; he was deep in Bernhard and Blanchot and all that Euro-miserable stuff I could never get into, but My Weil sounds more like something I might read, almost like a grittier Iris Murdoch novel...
Haha! Thanks for reading! The Iyer/Murdoch parallel hadn’t occurred to me (she of course always vehemently denied that she wrote philosophical fiction). I don’t know Iyer’s other writing; in this interview he says his recent fiction is inspired by the absurdity of studying continental philosophy in a country that doesn’t give a toss about it: https://hermitix.net/Episodes/Interviews+-+2023/214.+Weil%2C+Theory+Fiction%2C+and+Academia+with+Lars+Iyer
Ah, yes he had that preoccupation years ago too. I think Murdoch would cure him; she went from Sartre to Jane Austen as her model. I know I write as an American, but from here it looks like English guys get a terrible inferiority complex toward the Continent, as if nothing in the English canon could possibly measure up to Hegel or Flaubert or whatever, that Austen and Dickens and Wordsworth and Mill etc. are merely naive. And it's really not true; they should lean in to what's special in their own tradition. (This whole topic is a bit different for an American. We are, as Henry James said of Isabel Archer or Milly Theale or one of his girls, the heiress of all the ages. Then again Lars isn't English by ethnicity, so maybe everywhere is just becoming America.)
Am ambivalent about Weil, as you probably know, and for the gnostic reason, though I haven't read a lot of her and I do love the Iliad essay. I didn't know that Iyer book existed. I remember him from the radical blog days in the mid-2000s but I never read his fiction back then; he was deep in Bernhard and Blanchot and all that Euro-miserable stuff I could never get into, but My Weil sounds more like something I might read, almost like a grittier Iris Murdoch novel...
Haha! Thanks for reading! The Iyer/Murdoch parallel hadn’t occurred to me (she of course always vehemently denied that she wrote philosophical fiction). I don’t know Iyer’s other writing; in this interview he says his recent fiction is inspired by the absurdity of studying continental philosophy in a country that doesn’t give a toss about it: https://hermitix.net/Episodes/Interviews+-+2023/214.+Weil%2C+Theory+Fiction%2C+and+Academia+with+Lars+Iyer
Ah, yes he had that preoccupation years ago too. I think Murdoch would cure him; she went from Sartre to Jane Austen as her model. I know I write as an American, but from here it looks like English guys get a terrible inferiority complex toward the Continent, as if nothing in the English canon could possibly measure up to Hegel or Flaubert or whatever, that Austen and Dickens and Wordsworth and Mill etc. are merely naive. And it's really not true; they should lean in to what's special in their own tradition. (This whole topic is a bit different for an American. We are, as Henry James said of Isabel Archer or Milly Theale or one of his girls, the heiress of all the ages. Then again Lars isn't English by ethnicity, so maybe everywhere is just becoming America.)