Falling to the Heights: Simone Weil's Metaxu, Attention, and Decreation Through a Lacanian Len

In this dissertation I approach the work of Simone Weil through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and by doing so I provide a framework which demonstrates thematic consistency in Weil's literature. This framework is structured by three major constructs I find in her work: Metaxu, Attention and Decreation. Weil's work clearly addresses issues around social justice, morals and ethics. The way I read her work implies consideration of an internal pattern, at least in her works Gravity and Grace, and The Need for Roots. I venture into the constructs above in an effort to demonstrate their usefulness as structuring devices and ways of putting her thought into transformative understandings.;The reader will find that Weil's thought, as illustrated through Lacan's psychoanalytic science, makes available Metaxu, Attention, and Decreation in such a way as to illiterate consistent and viable applications to social justice and change. Metaxu opens a way of actively balancing and understanding dichotomies as contradictions, bereft of explanation through paradoxical thought, standing on their own. These contradictions point the way to the action of bringing just as much significance to one side of the dichotomy as to the other.;Attention is a process by which broader views of dualisms, with each opposite, though they may contradict one another, are accepted each for their uniqueness. An example would be when each side of the power/weakness dichotomy is accepted for its importance in the development of a theory of justice. For Weil, "the right union of opposites" occurs when the opposites are seen, through Attention, on a "higher plane," whereby contradiction is accepted. Weil, in this way, obliterates oppressive dualistic thought and opens a space for new meaning which transcends categories.;Decreation is the process by which a reality is not considered a creation until it passes into an uncreated or decreated space. As Weil (2002a) says, "Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated" (p. 32). It is upon and in these balances, recognitions, and spaces that an understanding of Weil's caring and work toward justice can first be considered. Such contradictoriness is puzzling unless it reaches a "higher plane" or the "uncreated" space of the transcendent.