ABSTRACT
The strong and slow boring of hard boards - a sustained, purposeful activity that meets obstacles and undertakes acts of transformation in the world. The metaphysical picture behind both Simone Weils and Hannah Arendt's accounts is that of an all-pervading necessity that forms the fabric of the world but wherein freedom, as the recognition of necessity, is nevertheless a human possibility. Simone Weils and Hannah Arendt's very different theoretical assessments of freedom in modernity nevertheless arise out of nearly identical diagnoses of the times. Here Weil introduces the idea that if human beings are to escape the humiliation foisted upon them by automatism, they must recover the capacity for methodical thought. This is the driving theme of her magnum opus, and the focus of her thought-action account of freedom as well. Ultimately, an Arendtian might argue, it threatens to reimprison human beings in the very existential solidity that theatrical politics is, in the first place, an attempt to overcome.
