On sublimation and the erotic experience: Simone Weil and Hans Loewald

Simone Weil's fragment "On Freud" suggests a radical reinterpretation of Freud's classical notions of sublimation and Eros. Here Weil's ideas are shown to resonate with those of Hans Loewald, himself a path-breaking and radical interpreter of Freud. Both Loewald and Weil's concepts of Eros and sublimation have to do with a from-to flow that reflects, at a higher level of organization, a nondifferentiated archaic unity of self and other. This resonance between Weil and Loewald is set against their overall diverging but complementary projects, as emerging from their distinct approaches to the notion of time.