Introduction

As evidenced by her time working in factories and fighting on the Spanish front, Simone Weil dedicated herself to thinking and acting on questions of cooperation and collectivity. In her work The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, Weil in fact meditated on the cooperative form, proposing that working conditions should be radically transformed to allow for work to be organized either at home or “in small workshops, which could very often be organized on a cooperative basis.” In this seminar, we will explore what resources and tools, both theoretical and practical, Weil offers to approach cooperation more productively How does her philosophy and the way she led her life help forge a path toward coöperism? To help address these questions, we are privileged to welcome two brilliant critical thinkers, both experts on Simone Weil’s political philosophy. Benjamin Davis, who joins us from Saint Louis University, is the author most recently of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins, just published this year at Rowman & Littlefield. Frieda Ekotto is the Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. A philosopher and intellectual historian, she is the author of several books, including Race and Sex across the French Atlantic (2011) and L’Ecriture carcérale et le discours juridique: Jean Genet (2001), and the current President of the Modern Languages Association (2023-2024). Welcome to Coöperism 7/13!