Décréation
A term coined by Simone Weil to denote consenting to no longer be the center—"passing from the created into the uncreated." Not to destroy oneself (which would pass the created into nothingness), but to undo within oneself the *I* that takes up all the space, to let in what she calls grace.
Décréation : faire passer du créé dans l'incréé. Destruction : faire passer du créé dans le néant. Ersatz coupable de la décréation.
Weil constructs the word through symmetry: if God creates by withdrawing to make room for being, man decreates by withdrawing in turn, to return that space. “We must renounce being something,” she writes—not out of self-loathing, but because the self, under the force of what she calls gravity, tends to occupy all available space. Decréation is the inverse movement: consenting to the void one is summoned to fill.
The trap she herself names is destruction, “a guilty ersatz of decréation.” To destroy is to cast the created into nothingness; to decreate is to pass it into the uncreated—toward more reality, not toward nothing. The distinction is decisive: Weilian asceticism is not violence done to oneself, still less inflicted on others (“doing all this to others, from the outside, is ersatz decréation”).
Not to be confused with the Taoist wu-wei, which relaxes clenched action to align with the course of things without cost: non-action embraces nature, whereas decréation resists it. The Taoist void is functional and serene; the Weilian void is endured, like a dark night. Decréation ≠ destruction, and decréation ≠ non-action.