Session: 5a
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 11.30–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.15
Chair: Margarita Carretero-González
Panel description: This panel will explore how three of Simone Weil’s core concepts, rootedness, attention, and sacredness, might help imagine new forms of “soft” resistance against humans’ violent oppression of other animals. Each panelist will discuss the relevance of one of the concepts listed above to imagining resistance through the human and nonhuman animal body, and through ethical relations between embodied beings. Simone Weil focused exclusively on human beings in her work. However, as animal studies scholars such Anat Pick and Silvia Caprioglio Panizza have noted, the central tenets of Weil’s ethical, political, religious, and philosophical worldview can be readily applied to nonhuman animals and our relationship with them. Attention to suffering can be interpreted as attention to animal suffering, while focusing on our common “creaturely” vulnerability eliminates the arbitrary dichotomy between humans and animals and dismantles the rationalist ethical framework. We want to investigate other possibilities for employing Weil’s insights to multispecies ethics and theories of resistance. We use the term “soft resistance” to indicate forms of refusal, rejection, and defence that may not be immediately recognizable as forms of resistance due to their subtlety, but are nonetheless powerful and effective.
Serrin Rutledge-Prior (Queen’s University) “Rootedness and Flourishing: Weil, Nussbaum, and the Needs of the Animal Soul”
Abstract: Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots (1943), is a meditation on the crisis of the human condition under modernity: a time which not only saw fascist governments wreak terror and havoc across Europe and beyond, but also the exponential growth of systems of production that left workers spiritually bereft. Humans were, in ways both material and psychological, increasingly left rootless; homeless. In offering an account of how we might (re)establish roots, Weil identifies fourteen “needs of the soul” that must be cultivated: order; liberty; obedience; responsibility; equality; hierarchism; honour; punishment; freedom of opinion; security; risk; private property; collective property; and truth. It is the first goal of this paper to explore how an attentiveness to these needs – as needs of all animals, not merely human animals – might prompt us to reevaluate our obligations to the other animals alongside whom we live, and reshape our shared homes. In doing so, the paper also prompts us to recognise how, lacking access to these needs, animals might engage in forms of resistance and rebellion – as do humans under conditions of similar rootlessness. The paper’s second aim is to put Weil in conversation with another theorist whose approach is ostensibly similar, yet who does not refer to Weil in her own work: Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, to propose a list of “capabilities” that are constitutive of a “flourishing” life, stands as an alternative to social-contract- and utilitarian-based approaches and has been highly influential in animal ethics. In exploring how Weil’s “needs” and Nussbaum’s “capabilities” overlap and diverge, the paper demonstrates how Weil’s work offers animal ethicists and political theorists interesting new foundations upon which to build more just multispecies communities.
Bio: Serrin Rutledge-Prior is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Ethics in the Philosophy Department at Queen’s University (Kingston/Katarokwi), where her research primarily centres around the issue of how animals can be better included in political spheres. Her first book, Multispecies Legality: Animals and the Foundation of Legal Inclusion was published with Cambridge University Press in 2025; her next book project, a collection co-edited with André Krebber, explores the place (and absences) of animals in canonical Western political thought.
Carlo Salzani (University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna), “The Ethics and Politics of Attention: Justice, Love, and Poetry as Resistance”
Abstract: Simone Weil’s notion of attention, also taken up and developed by Iris Murdoch, has become a staple feature of some stands of animal ethics, most notably ecocriticism and care ethics. Weil and Murdoch theorized attention as a selfless form of openness to beings, which is antithetical to the “egocentric” approach which involves a projection onto the other. Equated to a form of prayer and spiritual exercise (by the religious Weil as well as by the atheist Murdoch), it is by selflessly yielding to its object that attention allows for genuine understanding and true ethical action. The two main features of attention are justice and love, as clearly expressed in Murdoch’s definition of attention as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual.” Attention is therefore not merely a heightened and penetrating scrutiny of details, but instead a gaze modified by justice and love. After briefly discussing the main features of attention in Weil and Murdoch, I will argue that it can be used to characterize the gaze of the poet, and that (some) attentive poetry works as a form of resistance. A poetic, just and loving gaze is what can allow the embodied presence of nonhuman animals to emerge and impose itself on the observer, instead of being captured and erased by the colonizing gaze of the “scientist.” In the poetic approach (which is a general attitude and not only an artistic practice), justice and love welcome the animal presence and enable its truth to manifest itself, resisting the “imperialism of the same” of human supremacism.
Bio: Carlo Salzani is a research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, where he leads the project “Animal Suffering and the Politics of Shame,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is also a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. His latest book, Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination, was published in open access by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.
Zipporah Weisberg (University of Ottawa), “Animal Sanctuaries: Sacred Sites of Resistance”
Abstract: In her essay “Human Personality,” Simone Weil declared: “There is something sacred in every man. But it is not his person. Nor yet is it the human personality. It is this man; no more and no less.” It is not the colour of a person’s eyes, the clothes they are wearing, their position in society, or their character that makes them sacred, it is their very existence as a human being that affords them this status. This assertion has significant implications for social justice. It can be (mis)used by anti-abortion activists to deny women the right to reproductive autonomy, but outside such cynical applications, it can be employed to defend against arbitrary violence against any human being in any context. I want to suggest that the “sacredness” that Weil ascribes exclusively to human beings is also present in all animals. Without necessarily putting it in these terms, animal sanctuaries affirm animals’ sacredness as Weil defines it. They take it as a fundamental truth that each animal expects good to be done to them and not evil and that to commit evil against them is to desecrate them, and to betray them in the most profound way. The Latin root of the term ‘sacred’ or ‘sacer’ suggests that which ‘sets apart’, ‘consecrates’, or ‘makes holy.’ Animal sanctuaries, which are among the only places on earth in which animals are protected from systemic cruelty and offered a chance to live their lives in peace, comfort, and community, ‘consecrate’ animals by recognizing their intrinsic value irrespective of species, capability, or usefulness. Sanctuaries are themselves ‘set apart’ from the dominant ideology and system of violence and are, in this sense, ‘holy’ places. Ultimately, they engage in a powerful act of ‘soft’ resistance by refusing to participate in the wider culture’s routinized desecration of animal life in factory farms, laboratories, zoos, circuses, fur farms, and other abominations.
Bio: Zipporah Weisberg is an adjunct professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies and the Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts at the University of Ottawa. She is also a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. Her areas of specialization include critical animal studies, the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School, and existentialism and phenomenology. Zipporah has published on a wide range of topics, including climate justice and animal justice, the ethics and politics of cultured meat, the benefits and harms of animal assisted therapy, the ethical and ontological implications of biotechnology, and the psychopathology of speciesism. She is currently working on a book project on sanctuaries as a form of political refusal.