60 The New York Reviewwhich appears to have been one of the
last texts she wrote, Weil makes even
clearer the indissoluble link between
love of God and human obligation.
A truer reality beyond and above this
world escapes every human faculty
except attention and love, but it can
be recognized only by those who bear
equal respect to all human beings, and
“by them alone.” It enjoins on mankind
the “unique and perpetual obligation”
to rectify “all privations of the soul and
of the body likely to destroy or muti-
late the earthly life of any human being
whoever they may be.” Any state whose
doctrine provokes failure toward this
obligation in its citizens is subsisting in
crime.
This turns love of God into something
like a civic task, or at the very least the
sole mode of being through which the
evils of the world can
begin to be understood,
let alone redressed.
Remember, she is now
writing in 1942–1943, in
the midst of World War
II. Hitler’s Germany is
the criminal state she is
talking about. But even
though the full extent of
the Nazi genocide was
not yet known, and she
does allude at moments
to anti-Jewish persecu-
tion, her failure at this
point fully to acknowl-
edge the extent of that
persecution is, by general
consent, unforgivable.
Weil insisted that she
did not qualify as Jewish
under Vichy rule, as she
had neither been raised
or ever identified with
the Jewish faith. In re-
sponse to the Vichy gov-
ernment’s 1940 “Statut
des Juifs,” which she de-
rided, she suggested that
the best response for
Jews would be to assim-
ilate or even disappear.
In perhaps her worst
moment, she implied
that the uprooted Jewish
people were the origin
of uprootedness in the
world, which comes per-
ilously close to making them the cause
of their own persecution.
Why, Sylvie Weil asks in her mem-
oir, At Home with André and Simone
Weil (2010), could her aunt not see how
her political fervor echoed the ancient
prophets’ zeal? Why was she blind to
the glaring affinity between her own po-
litically charged generosity and the core
Jewish principle tzedakah, or charity, “a
form of justice, a way of restoring bal-
ance”? Her paternal grandmother, Eu-
génie Weil, who had lived by that very
principle, was a devout Jew. Sylvie Weil
thus corrects the view—more or less the
orthodoxy since Petrément’s 1976 biogra-
phy—that Simone was born into a family
of purely secular Jews. In fact, the hos-
tility of Simone’s mother, Selma, toward
her mother-in-law was a constant strain
in the family, filtering down through the
generations. As a young woman, Sylvie
smuggled herself into the library on her
father’s membership card to devour Tal-
mud treatises, Ginzberg’s legends, and
Graetz’s history of the Jews. “You are
doing what my sister would have done,”
André responds when he finds out,
“because she was honest, by and large.”Despite this dark shadow, Weil’s
spiritual journey was far from being
an exit from political life and thought.
Her encounters with God—in her cor-
respondence and notebooks she talks
of three divine visitations—intensify
her earthly commitments, for all the
ruthlessness with which she detaches
them from her Jewish antecedents. If
there was a turning point in her think-
ing, a far better candidate than her
mysticism would be her experience at
the front during the Spanish Civil War,
which is too often dismissed as a bit of
a joke because she had to be rescued by
her parents when she tripped and im-
mersed her leg in a drum of burning oil,
or because, to her credit as I see it, she
was useless at aiming a gun.
In fact, she had every intention of
returning to the front as soon as herwound had healed, on condition that
her solidarity would not require her
to be complicit with spilled blood.
For Zaretsky this experience hastens
her move away from political engage-
ment. Instead, I suggest, it initiates a
new level of political understanding.
She had already learned from George
Bernanos and others of the atrocities
being carried out on Franco’s veterans
by the insurgents, including the killing
of a fifteen-year-old boy who had been
offered the choice between death and
joining the anti-fascists, which he re-
fused to do, and of a young baker, who
was murdered in front of his father,
who promptly went mad. All of which
led her to recognize fully for the first
time the potential for violence, regard-
less of political affiliation, in everyone:
“As soon as any category of humans is
placed outside the pale of those whose
life has value, nothing is more natural
than to kill them.”
According to Camus, the experience
inflicted on Weil a “serious wound”
that never ceased to bleed. Out of this
moment emerges a sustained commit-
ment to confronting human violencein order not to fall prey to it. There
is an analogy, Weil insists, between
Germany’s treatment of Europe and
France’s conduct toward its colonies,
which would make victory in World
War II hollow unless decolonization—
to use today’s term—was the result. “I
must confess,” she had written in 1938
to Gaston Bergery, the editor of the
weekly newspaper La Flèche, when she
was still opposed to war against Hitler,
“that to my way of feeling, there would
be less shame for France even to lose
part of its independence than to con-
tinue trampling the Arabs, Indochi-
nese and others underfoot.”
France, like every other nation, had
been thinking only of “carving out for
herself her share of black or yellow
human flesh.” In her 1938 essay on the
colonial problem in the French Empire,
she suggested that it
would not be hard to find
a colony ruled by a dem-
ocratic nation imposing
harsher constraints than
those exerted by the
worst totalitarian state
in Europe. This, as she
knew, was a scandal-
ous observation when
preserving democracy
was generally accepted
as a central aim of the
approaching war. But
she was right that a de-
mocracy made up of
opposing parties had
been powerless to pre-
vent the formation of a
party whose aim was the
overthrow of democracy
itself.
For Weil, colonial-
ism was the exertion of
force in its purest form,
uprooting or eradicating
the traditions it meets
in its path, destroying
all traces of indige-
nous histories, wiping
out communities’ own
memories, and then, as
the final insult, deny-
ing the violence it has
wrought. (“Simone Weil
anti- colonialist” is the
title given by her editors
to this section of her
collected works.) What follows, in the
colonizing nations, is a regime of “ig-
norance and forgetting,” a whitewash
of their own past. The problem, Weil
concludes, “is that, as a general rule,
a people’s generosity rarely extends to
making the effort to uncover the injus-
tices committed in their name.”
Weil is treading on dangerous
ground, and not just because of the
analogy she makes between Nazism
and colonization. (Today, though the
connection can be traced back to Han-
nah Arendt and Frantz Fanon, any such
link is routinely met with outrage.) She
is describing what psychoanalysis sub-
sequently theorized as the process of
projection, a way of ridding oneself of
anguish that makes it more or less im-
possible for people, regardless of what
they may have done or what might have
been enacted in their name, to shoul-
der the burden of guilt, whether his-
torical or personal. These lines from
her 1942 essay “Forms of the Implicit
Love of God,” written on the eve of
leaving France, read almost as if they
were lifted from the famous Austrian-
British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein:In so far as we register the evil
and ugliness within us, it horri-
fies us and we reject it like vomit.
Through the operation of transfer-
ence, we transport this discomfort
into the things that surround us.
But these same things, which turn
ugly and sullied in turn, send back
to us, increased, the ill we have
lodged inside them. In this process
of exchange, the evil within us ex-
pands and we start to feel that the
very milieu in which we are living
is a prison.Weil knew the process of projection
at first hand. Her headaches made her
want to hit others in the head and to
besmirch the whole world with her own
pain. In a strange and most likely un-
intended echo of Freud on the death
drive, Weil argues that death is the
“norm and aim of life.” Only if one rec-
ognizes “with all one’s soul” the frailty
of human life and the mortality of the
flesh, and admits that we are a “mere
fragment of living matter,” will we stop
killing. The resonances are as political
as they are personal and intimate, not
least for nations on the cusp of victory.In her 1940 essay “On the Origins of
Hitlerism,” she wrote that “the vic-
tory of those defending by means of
arms a just cause, is not necessarily,
a just victory.” She was pleading with
the Allies, when the moment arrived,
not to disarm Germany by force. The
only way to avoid doing so would be for
the victors—“allowing that this is our
destiny”—to “accept for themselves
the transformation they would have
imposed on the vanquished.” (Not, we
might say, the customary path taken
by nations that win wars.) Weil is pro-
posing a radical identification across
enemy lines, which requires each of
us to be willing to see ourselves in the
least likely or hoped-for place. This is
a version of Rawls once more, but now
with a psychodynamic gloss and inter-
national, military, colonial reach. To
mention Beauvoir again, it is Weil’s
heart beating right across the globe.
Why has this psychodynamic aspect of
her politics received so little attention?
In these moments Weil is proposing
a new ethic, one that goes far beyond
the idea of attention, or being seized
by the other, which Zaretsky rightly
picks out as one key to her thought. It
is more like magical thinking, because,
by giving over one’s very being to the
wretched of the earth (“pauper, refu-
gee, black, the sick, the re-offender”),
you are flipping the natural revulsion
humans feel toward misery—natural,
that is, for those who have been even
minimally spared. You are turning
disgust into a willing and tender em-
brace. “It is as easy,” Weil suggested,
“to direct the mind willingly towards
affliction as it is for a dog, with no prior
training, to walk straight into a fire
and allow itself to be burnt to death.”
An “upsurge” of energy “transports”
you into the other. You lose yourself
in allowing the other to be (contrary
to power-grabbing, which expands to
fill all the available space). In the final
analysis, with the odds piled against it,
only such a move makes it possible to
recognize the fundamental equality
and identity of all people, which means
it is also the only chance for justice.
It is, then, all the more ironic that the
one leap of identification she herselfThe cover of one of Simone Weil’s notebooks from 1941Bibliothèque nationale de France, ParisRoseLetters 58 _ 63 .indd 60 12 / 16 / 21 6 : 59 PM