January 13, 2022 59
than not, her concepts slide into and
out of one another in a sometimes cre-
ative, sometimes tortured amalgam or
blur. Weil’s writing is like an intricate
tapestry with multiple strands—pull on
one and it can feel as if the whole thing
will fall apart in your hands.
Nonetheless, the absence of “justice”
from the list strikes me as a strange
omission in what I read for the most part
as an informative and attentive book.
Weil’s heart was set on justice. It was her
refrain. A recurring principle in pretty
much every stage of her writing from
start to finish, the concept of justice ren-
ders futile any attempt—though many
have tried—to separate Weil the mystic
from Weil the activist, or Weil the lover
of God from Weil the factory worker,
who felt that the only way to understand
the wrongs of the modern world was to
share the brute indignities of manual
labor, which reduced women and men
to cogs in the machines they slaved for.
Weil changed her mind a number of
times, most significantly when she repu-
diated her earlier pacifism after Hitler
invaded Prague in March 1939. By then
she had also lost her faith in Marxism
and in any version of politics grounded
in parties and trade unions, or in what
she increasingly came to see, from the
Hebrews and Romans to Hitler, as the
inevitably totalitarian powers of state;
her unqualified inclusion of the He-
brews in that list is seen by many as the
most compromised and treacherous
component of her writing. But on cer-
tain matters she never falters. Right to
the end, she grappled with the question
of how to conduct oneself in the service
of a more equitable world. “The Chris-
tian (by instinct if not by baptism) who,
in 1943, died in a London hospital be-
cause she would not eat ‘more than her
ration,’” wrote her former pupil Anne
Reynaud-Guérithault in her preface to
Weil’s Lectures in Philosophy, “was the
same person I had known, sharing her
salary in 1933 with the factory-workers
of Roanne.”
Measuring her food portions served
no one, but in both cases Weil was of-
fering up a piece of herself. She was
weighing her actions on the scale of jus-
tice. Far from being a narcissistic act,
as these endeavors are characterized
by her critics (serving her own con-
science or slumming it), Weil’s work
in the factory and on the farm is better
understood as her way of anticipating
the proposition advanced in 1971 by
the legal theorist John Rawls that jus-
tice will be done only when humans are
willing to envisage themselves—or, in
her case, to put herself—in the place
of the disadvantaged and oppressed.
“Only if you believe your place is on
the lowest rung of the ladder,” she
wrote in her Marseille notebook of
1941–1942, “will you be led to regard
others as your equal rather than giving
preference to yourself.” She was not
martyring herself. She was demonstrat-
ing, in her person, a form of universal
accountability. “I envied her,” Simone
de Beauvoir stated, “for having a heart
that could beat right across the world.”
Weil wanted to be in the thick of
it. As a ten-year-old in Paris she had
joined a demonstration of workers
demanding shorter hours and higher
wages; a year later, she was back on the
streets on behalf of the unemployed. In
the 1930s, while teaching philosophy at
the lycée in Le Puy in the Haute-Loire,
she organized and led a demonstration
on behalf of unemployed workers who
had been given the thankless task of
breaking stones in the city square. She
was charged with incitement and threat-
ened with dismissal from her teaching
post. When the committee asked her to
explain why she had been seen in a café
with a worker, she replied, “I refuse to
answer questions about my private life.”
Le Charivari, a Parisian weekly, de-
scribed her as “the Jewess, Mme Weil,”
a “militant of Moscow.” (The episode
came to be known as “the Simone Weil
Affair.”) According to other reports,
the Anti-Christ had arrived in Le Puy
wearing silk stockings and dressed
as a man. Only the second was true.
Weil wouldn’t have been seen dead in
silk stockings. She cross-dressed all
her life. On one occasion she agreed
to accompany her parents to the opera
on condition of being allowed to wear
a specially made tuxedo. Her mother
did her utmost to encourage in her the
“forthrightness” of a boy rather than
the “simpering graces” of a girl. As a
young woman, she signed her letters to
her mother, “Your son, Simon.”
Much later, in a letter from New York
in 1942, Weil explained to an old school
friend, Maurice Schumann, that she
sought hardship and danger only be-
cause the oppression of others pierced
her to the core, “annihilating” her fac-
ulties. Action alone would allow her to
avoid “being wasted by sterile chagrin.”
Today we can only be struck by how far
her final plan—to parachute nurses into
occupied France, where they would risk
their lives in the service of care—mir-
ror s what we have w it nes sed i n hospit a ls
everywhere in response to Covid-19, a
new form of global solidarity that has
been one of the few positive outcomes
of a pandemic that has also laid bare
and exacerbated the world’s inequali-
ties. It was this plan, which she held on
to passionately till the very end, that
led de Gaulle, when he was presented
with it by one of her keenest advocates,
to dismiss Weil as a madwoman. Struck
low by repeated rejection, she felt that
she risked dying of grief (a good reason
not to rush to classify her death as sui-
cide, as many have done, including the
coroner). According to Simone Petré-
ment, no one in London responsible for
her care believed that she wanted to die.A central question that has vexed
so much political thought becomes
why justice is always so elusive. Weil’s
struggle with this question makes her
a psychologist of human power. “Ev-
eryone,” wrote the Athenian historian
and army general Thucydides in lines
that she quoted more than once, “com-
mands wherever he has the power to
do so.” No one can resist mastery over
others, because the alternative—to be
dominated—is so wretched. “We know
only too well,” the quotation continues,
“that you too, like all the rest, as soon
as you reach a certain level of power,
will do likewise.” (That “you” is ge-
neric and aimed at everyone.) Justice
requires, before anything else, a laying
down of arms, in both senses of the
term. It demands a “supernatural vir-
tue,” Weil comments, because, however
advantaged you might be, it involves
behaving as if the world were equal;
“supernatural” therefore suggests both
inspired by divine grace and requiring
superhuman effort, as if it were almost
too much to ask of anyone.These reflections on power come in
the midst of her 1942 text Attente de
Dieu, her deepest meditation on God:
“The true God is God conceived as
all-powerful, but as not commanding
everywhere he has the power to do so.”
(This makes God the one exception to
Thucydides’ rule.) In fact, “God causes
this universe to exist, but he consents
not to command it.” Through Creation,
God renounced being “everything.” To
revolt against God because of human
misery is to misrepresent God as a
“sovereign” or tyrant who rules the
world, as opposed to a deity who has
laid down his power. It falls on humans
to create a better world—a form of
freedom, or divine abandonment, or
both.
Most often translated as Waiti ng for
God, Attente de Dieu might also be
rendered as God’s Expectation; it is
God who is waiting for man to fulfill
this promise. To do so, he must relin-
quish the misguided conviction, cher-
ished by the strong, that the justice of
their cause outweighs that of the weak.
Nothing, we might say, perpetuates
injustice as much as the belief of the
privileged that their privilege is just.
Or, as Weil observes in her Marseille
notebook, “the rich are invincibly led
to believe they are someone.”
In an unstable world, Weil observes
in one of her finest essays, “Person-
hood and the Sacred,” written during
her last months in London, the privi-
leged seek to allay their bad conscience
either by defiance (“It is perfectly fine
that you lack the privileges I possess”)
or through bad faith (“I claim for each
and every one of you an equal share in
the privileges I myself enjoy”). The sec-
ond, she comments, is condescending
and empty; the first is simply odious.
If US conservatism seems unapolo-
getic in affirming the former, British
conservatism has historically oscillated
between the two. Today the idea of
“checking your privilege” has entered
the public lexicon, to be met with a bar-
rage of criticism—as if keeping an eye
on your privilege somehow made it all
OK (hardly what Weil had in mind).
Weil’s concept of “decreation” is
undoubtedly her most difficult. In the
moment of creation, God shed bits and
pieces of himself; this made human be-
ings the debris of a gesture that leaves
neither God nor humans complete.
In one of the strongest, earliest com-
mentaries on Weil, Susan Taubes, best
known for her 1969 novel Divorcing,
unravels Weil’s proposition that human
existence is “our greatest crime against
God.” Man must “decreate” himself
in order to restore to God what he has
lost. For Taubes, Weil has created a
negative theodicy: “The dark night of
God’s absence is itself the soul’s contact
with God.” Suffering must be intolera-
ble for the “cords that attach us to the
world break.” As Taubes sees it, Weil
is finally offering as grave an insult to
those who suffer as those who prom-
ise they will be rewarded in heaven or
that their suffering serves God’s final
purpose.
Weil herself knew she had presented
the world with a spiritual conundrum
that she had failed to solve. “I feel
an ever- increasing sense of devasta-
tion,” she wrote to Schumann some-
time between her arrival in London
in December 1942 and her admission
to Middlesex Hospital in April 1943,
“both in my intellect and in the centre
of my heart, at my inability to thinkwith truth at the same time about the
affliction of men, the perfection of God
and the link between the two.” She was
mortified.
In the libretto to the opera Decre-
ation, Anne Carson gives the kinder,
poetic rendering of Weil’s dilemma.
For her, Weil is better understood as
making an erotic triangle between
God, herself, and the whole of cre-
ation. As Carson cites Weil, “I am not
the maiden who awaits her betrothed
but the unwelcome third.” In her New
York notebook of 1942, Weil compared
God to an importunate woman cling-
ing to her lover and whispering end-
lessly in his ear: “I love you. I love you.
I love you.” (Like all mystics, her faith
never detracts from the sensuousness
of her writing.) For Carson, Weil, along
with Sappho and Marguerite Porete,
the fourteenth- century French mystic
who was burned at the stake, “had the
nerve to enter a zone of absolute spir-
itual daring” in which the self or ego
dissolves.
This is just one moment in Weil’s
thinking that resonates with psycho-
analysis. Weil had taught Freud’s con-
cepts of repression and the unconscious
in her philosophy classes at the girls’
lycée in Roanne in 1933–1934. What
was “dangerous” (her word) about
Freud’s work, she wrote, was the idea
that purity and impurity can coexist in
the mind: “Thoughts we do not think,
wishes we do not wish in our soul”
(like “wooden horses in which... there
are warriors leading an independent
life”). “Are there really in our souls,”
she objected, “thoughts which escape
us?” It would take some time before
she herself would embrace such a radi-
cal disorientation of the ego as the only
possible spiritual and psychic path to
take. “What we believe to be our self
[moi],” she wrote, is as “fugitive” as
“the shape of a wave on the sea.”None of this detracts one iota from
Weil’s passionate presence in her own
life. “If we are to perish,” she wrote
in her 1934 essay “Oppression and
Liberty,” “let us see to it that we do
not perish without having existed.”
How, Carson asks, can we square her
“dark ideas” with the “brilliant self-
assertiveness of [her] writerly proj-
ect?” “The answer is we can’t.” Carson
considers Weil’s thinking, writing,
and being as the best riposte to her
own afflicted vision. This seems to me
to be more consistent with, and cer-
tainly fairer to, Weil as I read her than
Taubes’s finally uncompromising cri-
tique. However bleak the terrain, noth-
ing, she repeatedly insists, must “be
allowed, far from it, to reduce by one
jot our energy for the struggle.”
At the heart of that struggle was the
most fundamental and cherished form
of mental freedom, which was currently
under threat: “It is often said that force
is powerless to overcome thought,”
she wrote as early as 1934, before the
extent of the danger was fully clear,
“but for this to be true there must be
thought.” It was the reason why, despite
her conversion, she would not enter the
Catholic Church, whose concept of
heresy she found suffocating. The well-
spring of a crushing totalitarianism,
she argued, resides in the use of these
two little words: anathema sit. She re-
fused to be baptized.
In her “Draft for a Statement of
Obligations Toward Human Beings,”