Living Speech
Resisting the Empire of Force
Introduction
THE EMPIRE OF FORCE AND THE WORLD OF WORDS
In an important sense this entire book is an extended essay on the single
sentence that stands as its epigraph, taken from Simone Weil's wonderful
essay on the Iliad: "No one can love and be just who does not understand
the empire of force and know how not to respect it." For the purposes of
this book it is a crucial fact that our knowledge of the empire and our
capacity not to respect it-and the opposite of these things-all show up
constantly in our uses of language, in what we confirm and what we resist,
in what we reveal and what we hide, as we speak and write.
THE EMPIRE OF FORCE AS WAR
Weil wrote her essay on the Iliad during the period of fascism in Europe,
just at the beginning of World War II, and saw the ancient poem as
speaking directly to the horrible moment in which Europe and the world
found themselves. The Iliad is of course about a stage in the Trojan war,
which it describes in great and bloody detail. ... read full excerpt from Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force ebook
