 In her late period Weil provided an explication of the all-pervasive and indiscriminate concept of “force” in the essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” (1940 in SWA 182–215). It is important to note Weil’s locus of enunciation for this concept, temporally after the fall of France and spatially from a position of exile, including antisemitic marginalization, which is why the essay appeared in the December 1940 and January 1941 Cahiers du Sud under the anagrammatic pseudonym Emile Novis, taken up by Weil to avoid antisemitic confrontation and censorship. This essay was not only the most widely read of Weil’s pieces during her lifetime, but it was also her first essay to appear in English, translated by Mary McCarthy and published in Dwight Macdonald’s magazine Politics in 1945 (November, pp. 321–330).