58 The New York ReviewAn Endless Seeing
Jacqueline Rose
The Subversive Simone Weil:
A Life in Five Ideas
by Robert Zaretsky.
University of Chicago Press,
181 pp., $20.00The French philosopher Simone Weil’s
two visits to Italy in 1937 and 1938 were
among the happiest experiences of her
life. “For some years,” she wrote to
the young medical student Jean Pos-
ternak on her return to Paris in 1938,
“I have held the theory that joy is an
indispensable ingredient in human life,
for the health of the mind.” Absence
of joy, she suggested, is the “equivalent
of madness.” Shortly before her trip,
which began at Lake Maggiore and
took in the cultural treasures of Milan,
Florence, and Rome, she had been ad-
mitted to the hospital for headaches
that sometimes struck with such in-
tensity that she wanted to die. “Joy” is
perhaps not a word most readily associ-
ated with Weil. On the other hand, the
epithet of “madness” has constantly
trailed her, mostly coming from those
who could not fathom her, including
Charles de Gaulle, who came to know
of her through the papers on resistance
that she wrote in London in the last
year of her life.
And yet it is central to Weil’s unique
form of genius that she knew how to
identify the threat of incipient madness
for the citizens of a world turning in-
sane. A straight line runs through her
writing from the insufferable cruelty of
modern social arrangements—worker
misery, swaths of the world colonized
and uprooted by “white races,” force
as the violent driver of political will—
to the innermost tribulations of the
human heart. What would it mean,
under the threat of victorious fascism,
not to feel that you might go crazy?
During the course of her Italian
visits, Weil encountered several Fas-
cists, one of whom stated, in response
to her outspoken antifascism, that her
“legitimate and normal” place in so-
ciety would be down a salt-mine. Weil
reacted to the suggestion with some-
thing akin to glee. Surely, she wrote,
that would be less suffocating than
the political atmosphere aboveground:
“The nationalist obsession, the adora-
tion of power in its most brutal form,
the collectivity (Plato’s ‘great beast’),
the camouflaged deification of death.”
Likewise, France on the eve of World
War II was living in an “unbreath-
able moral atmosphere” as it fought
against the ignominy of demotion to a
second-class power, while still “intox-
icated” by Louis XIV and Napoleon,
who believed himself to be an object
“both of terror and love to the whole
universe.”
“An incredible amount of lying,
false information, demagogy, mixed
boastfulness and panic” were the con-
sequence of the deluded public mood.
She could be describing the UK in
the throes of Brexit, or the US faced
with the ascendancy of China, as they
each struggle to stave off a similar fate.
For Weil, such laments are misplaced.
“Freedom, justice, art, thought, and
similar kinds of greatness” are not the
monopoly of the dominant nations.
Far from it. Think small—one of herfavorite words was “infinitesimal”—if
you want to create a more equal and
peaceable world. “French sanity,” she
concluded, “is becoming endangered.
To say nothing of the rest of Europe.”
Weil is best known as a political phi-
losopher, a revolutionary trade-union
activist, a mystic who devoted her last
years to the search for sacred truth,
and a Jew who turned to Catholicism,
rejecting her heritage. She was also a
classicist, a poet, an occasional sculp-
tor, and the author of an unfinished
play. “Why,” she proclaimed, “have I
not the infinite number of existences I
need?” She was haunted, she wrote, by
the idea of a statue of Justice—a naked
woman standing, knees bent from fa-
tigue, hands chained behind her back,
leaning toward scales holding two
equal weights in its unequal arms, so
that it inclined to one side. Despite the
weight and weariness, the woman’s face
would be serene. As so often in Weil’s
writing, it is almost impossible not to
read this image as a reference to her-
self, although her political and moral
vision always looked beyond her own
earthly sphere of existence, which she
held more or less in steady contempt.
She may have been sculpting herself in
her dreams, but her template was uni-
versal. Justice was for all or for none.
The fact that Justice was a woman
was not incidental. According to Sim-
one Petrément, her biographer and oneof her closest friends, Weil’s mother
told her that killing to prevent a rape
was the one exception she made to the
commandment against murder. Much
later, she took the image of a young
girl refusing—with an “upsurge” of her
whole being—to be forced into prosti-
tution as the model of a true politics.
Antigone and Electra were Weil’s her-
oines, both belonging to the Greek lin-
eage in which she sourced the cultural
values she most cherished in the mod-
ern Western world. (She translated cen-
tral passages from Sophocles’ plays.)
Antigone in particular she returned to
at the end of her life, for her appeal to
an unwritten law that transcends nat-
ural rights—which, as she saw it, al-
ways sink to the individual claim. The
Greeks, she insisted, had no notion of
rights: “They contented themselves
with the name of justice.”As Robert Zaretsky recounts in his
recent life study, The Subversive Si-
mone Weil, Albert Camus was one of
the earliest devotees of her writing. In
a special issue of the Nouvelle revue
française dedicated to Weil in 1949,
he described justice as the principle to
which the whole of her work was “con-
secrated.” (He recognized that for her,
this had been a spiritual calling.) Jus-
tice, then, should “surely guarantee her
a place in the first rank,” a prize thatshe had so “stubbornly refused” when
alive. Camus did all he could to fulfill
his own prediction. As editor of the se-
ries Espoir at Gallimard, he published
seven of her works, tracing the arc of
her writing from La condition ouvrière,
her acclaimed account of the human
degradation of factory work, which she
experienced firsthand in 1934–1935,
to her final extended essay, The Need
for Roots, a meditation on the evil of
displacement precipitated by her own
exile from France during the war.
Her output was prodigious, and she
never stopped writing even though,
apart from a scattering of essays, not
one of her works appeared during her
lifetime. She was convinced that she
would be forgotten, a prospect that
did not appear to dismay her. In one
of her last letters to her parents in July
1943, she wrote of her inner certainty
that she contained within her a deposit
of pure gold that should be passed on
but most likely wouldn’t be: “This does
not distress me at all.” Weil was a refu-
gee—she described herself as an exile
wherever she found herself. Together
with her parents, she had fled the im-
minent Nazi occupation of France to
New York, having first traveled to Mar-
seilles on the last train to leave Paris on
June 13, 1940.
She felt she had deserted her people,
and almost on arrival in America in-
sisted on going to London in the face
of her parents’ objections, in the sole
hope of joining the forces of resistance
across the Channel. Her final letters,
brimming with optimism, kept her par-
ents completely in the dark about her
rapid physical decline. In April 1943
she had been admitted to Middlesex
Hospital with tuberculosis, from which
she had no chance of recovering since
she refused to eat any more than the
rations her compatriots were receiving
in France. “Hope,” she instructed them
in one of her final letters, “but in mod-
eration.” She was thirty-four years old
when she died.
After her death, her parents devoted
themselves to a painstaking transcrip-
tion of her work, including every word
of the outpourings of her final months,
which contained some of her most im-
portant writing. According to her niece
Sylvie Weil, born in the last year of
Simone’s life, the question of owner-
ship—where the reams of paper should
be housed, how they should be pub-
lished—effectively tore her surviving
family to pieces. (Sylvie was the daugh-
ter of Simone’s only brother, the distin-
guished mathematician André Weil.)
“You have,” she reproaches Simone in
her memoir, “bequeathed these ruined
faces to me.”
As Zaretsky points out, there is no
one thread running through her writ-
ings, a difficulty he responds to by
picking out the five themes he consid-
ers most representative of her thought:
affliction, attention, resistance, roots,
and “the good, the bad, and the godly”
(the last referring to her version of mys-
ticism, in which spiritual apprehension
was the one true source of a viable
ethical life). This has the advantage of
focus but, as he is aware, compartmen-
talizes her ideas, creating distinctions
and separations whereas, more oftenSimone Weil; illustration by Andrea VenturaRoseLetters 58 _ 63 .indd 58 12 / 16 / 21 6 : 59 PM