The project explores the largely unexamined relationship between three outsiders of twentieth-century French philosophy and literature: Simone Weil, Georges Bataille, and Colette Peignot (»Laure«). From a brief phase of shared political engagement in the anti-fascist Cercle communiste démocratique (1930–1934) , only fragments of an exchange remain, in which presence manifests itself in the mode of absence: as unsent letters, personal notes, literary echoes, and archival gaps. Drawing on this fragmentary material, the project reconstructs the history of an ultimately failed encounter and asks how it nevertheless left lasting traces in the thought and writing of all three. A particular focus is on the historically marginalized writings of Colette Peignot, which open up a hitherto largely overlooked space of resonance between Bataille and Weil.

Peter Schneider is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He studied Philosophy in Vienna and Media Studies, with a focus on the history of science, in Weimar. His research concerns figures at the margins of the history of philosophy and heterodox forms of philosophical writing. It explores historical constellations in which philosophy encounters art, religion, science, and politics, as well as questions of the materiality, mediality, and archival transmission of philosophical texts.