Living Speech for All

No one can love and be just who does not understand the empire of force and know how not to respect it. ~Simone Weil

This single sentence from Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad triggered James Boyd White’s unwavering interest in the activity of speech. His book, Living Speech, is “a profound examination of the ethics of human expression—in the law and in the rest of life.”

From the publisher:

Language is our key to imagining the world, others, and ourselves. Yet sometimes our ways of talking dehumanize others and trivialize human experience. In war other people are imagined as enemies to be killed. The language of race objectifies those it touches, and propaganda disables democracy. Advertising reduces us to consumers, and clichés destroy the life of the imagination.

Boyd’s breakdown of Weil’s “empire of force”:

That is in fact the poem’s central achievement: to identify and to criticize, indeed to undermine, what Weil calls the empire of force—the ideology, the way of imagining the world and oneself and others within it—that is always present in war and required by it, but present also in our lives whenever people deny the humanity of others whom they destroy, manipulate, or exploit.

Posted by Toni Urquhart