Overview
Simone Weil's notebooks reassembled around the concept of decreation: the discipline of attention and the stripping of ego.
Simone Weil left a teaching post to work on a factory line, went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and died in 1943 at thirty-four, leaving behind notebooks that have shaped philosophy, theology and art ever since. At their center is one idea: decreation, the discipline of undoing the self so that the world can be seen as it is.
Decreation gathers Weil’s notebooks and journals into a single sequence around that idea, following it through attention, force, ideology, affliction and love. The concept that later gave 2026 Nobel laureate Anne Carson the title of her book appears here as Weil developed it, newly translated by Penny Hueston.
The volume is introduced by the artist Philippe Parreno, who brings decreation into the present: an age in which attention is engineered, captured and sold. For Weil, the answer was not withdrawal but a kind of humility in which any simple act, done with full attention, could become transcendent.
First published in Japanese by ISOLARII for the 2025 Okayama Art Summit, where 30,000 copies were passed hand to hand through the city, Decreation now appears in English for the first time.
Simone Weil left a teaching post to work on a factory line, went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and died in 1943 at thirty-four, leaving behind notebooks that have shaped philosophy, theology and art ever since. At their center is one idea: decreation, the discipline of undoing the self so that the world can be seen as it is.
Decreation gathers Weil’s notebooks and journals into a single sequence around that idea, following it through attention, force, ideology, affliction and love. The concept that later gave 2026 Nobel laureate Anne Carson the title of her book appears here as Weil developed it, newly translated by Penny Hueston.
The volume is introduced by the artist Philippe Parreno, who brings decreation into the present: an age in which attention is engineered, captured and sold. For Weil, the answer was not withdrawal but a kind of humility in which any simple act, done with full attention, could become transcendent.
First published in Japanese by ISOLARII for the 2025 Okayama Art Summit, where 30,000 copies were passed hand to hand through the city, Decreation now appears in English for the first time.
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