In Simone Weil's philosophical and literary work, obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: the other's self-affirmation and one's own dislocation; what one has and what one has to give; a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand implied by asking nothing. The other's claims upon the self--which induce unfinished obligation, unmet sleep, hunger--drive the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality at the heart of this book.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind is a study in decreative ethics in which self-dispossession conditions...