Portrait of Simone

"The true hero, the true subject matter,
the center of the Iliad is force..."

Simone Weil's search for truth in a world that seemed destined for collapse led her backward through literary history.

I have transcribed the Greek text of the epic poem onto 'bloody bandages', reenacting what I imagined to be her obsessive attention to language and ascetic ritual. And just as the stanzas of the Iliad pile one brutalized body upon another—yet another corpse upon a heap of corpses—I built my portrait of Simone.

Here she stands: a towering spectre of Homeric voices chanting the fantasies, and fallacies, of power.

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