Life Uprooted. Social and Moral Challenges of Woe

Abstract

Entering into dialogue with Simone Weil, this article contributes to the identification of woe as a social and psychological phenomenon that should not remain hidden and minimized anymore. Affliction is described as a kind of extreme suffering that causes a partial or total loss of self-appropriation (the possibility of inhabiting the own self and the world), self-blame and self-shame. Moreover, it is accompanied by social degradation, marginalization, guilt and shame, such that institutions and even social theories can feed its perverse inertia. Woe has such overwhelming destructive power that any socio-political order that causes it should be completely reformed. Because of its opacity, it poses a considerable moral challenge too, one that I propose to tackle by exploring the possibilities of compassion, care and attention as resources for moral agents. Finally, only by restoring the conditions for a re-rooting in life and in the world is it possible to re-appropriate one’s self lost in malheur.