Once a month, Le Devoir challenges philosophy enthusiasts to decipher a current issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
Current geopolitical events seem difficult to decipher. However, we all know how it ends. It is precisely this exasperating déjà-vu that leads to complex thinkers like Simone Weil and René Girard, rather than TV experts.
Rarely in dialogue, they offer a striking reading grid together. Weil diagnoses: war without a concrete objective generates unlimited violence that escapes those who initiate it. But she does not fully answer the subsequent question: why do men reach this point? This is where Girard takes over, revealing the internal engine of what Weil described – mimetic desire and the scapegoat. One diagnoses, the other dissects.
Simone Weil understood long before the end of World War II what strategists would take decades to admit: once war is initiated, it escapes those who started it.
In The Iliad or the Poem of Force (1940), written as German tanks entered Paris, the philosopher observes that force transforms both the one who undergoes it and the one who believes it to be controlled. The soldier who kills eventually forgets why he kills. The general who orders ends up obeying the logic of war itself.
It is not the force that strikes: it is the ancient and foundational fear that eventually turns against the innocent that it claimed to protect. What allows the mechanism to function indefinitely is precisely what comes after: forgetfulness.
The mechanism of the scapegoat only works because it is accompanied by a duty of forgetfulness. The community must transform its founding crime into myth, narrative, or sacrifice.
These two thinkers leave us with a truth that neither strategists nor diplomats can articulate without contradicting themselves: we will not emerge from this crisis through more deterrence or show of force. These tools manage symptoms but do not name the source. What is it?
Weil asks for attention – to look at the other in their full reality without turning them into a useful enemy or a convenient victim. Girard asks for something more difficult: to recognize the mechanism within ourselves. Not in the adversary. In us. In how we designate, forget, and construct our narratives on silences we have chosen.
The question is no longer “Why war?” We know the mechanisms too well. The more brutal and urgent question is this: on whose bodies, at this precise moment, are we building our next peace?
