 In her essay on the Iliad—a text Roberto Esposito calls “a phenomenology of force” (Esposito 1996 [2017: 46])—Weil further develops an understanding of force initially presented in her earlier, unfinished essay “Reflections on Barbarism” (1939): “I believe that the concept of force must be made central in any attempt to think clearly about human relations” (quoted in Pétrement 1973 [1976: 361]). The protagonist of the Iliad, Weil writes in an original reading, is not Achilles or Hector, but force itself. Like her concept of “power” in her early writings, “force” reifies and dehumanizes no matter if one wields or undergoes it. Further, force includes not only coercion, but also prestige, which is to say that it has a social element. Two important implications follow. First, on the level of the individual, each “personality” (la personne) is informed by social values and thereby features the operations of force through accidental characteristics, such as the name of the family into which one is born or the embodied features that are considered physically attractive at a certain place, in a certain society, at a certain time. Second, on the level of the collectivity, force can destroy not only bodies, but also values and cultures, as is the case, Weil is at pains to point out, in French colonialism. In her mid-to-late writings, then, she saw neither Marx’s notion of class nor Hegel’s self-development of Geist, but force itself, as the key to history. She presents this concept as “the force that kills” and as a specific kind of violence “that does not kill just yet”, though