The London Review of Books – 3.7.2021
Vol. 43 No. 13 · 1 July 2021
THE SUBVERSIVE SIMONE WEIL: A LIFE IN FIVE IDEAS
I came with a sword
Toril Moi
THE SUBVERSIVE SIMONE WEIL: A LIFE IN FIVE IDEAS
by Robert Zaretsky.
Chicago, 181 pp., £16
We don’t admire Simone Weil because we agree with her, Susan Sontag argued in 1963: ‘I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas.’ What we admire, Sontag thought, is her extreme seriousness, her absolute effort to become ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’, to make herself a person who is ‘rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Sontag underestimates the power of Weil’s ideas, I think, but she is right to say that in the minds of readers, Weil’s thought and life are intrinsically connected. Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.
Simone’s father, Bernard Weil, was a successful doctor. Her mother, Selma, had wanted to study medicine, but her father wouldn’t allow it. Thoroughly assimilated French Jews, Simone’s parents practised no religion, and didn’t tell their children that they were Jewish until they were teenagers. Simone, born in 1909, was overshadowed by her older brother, André, a mathematical genius who at the age of twelve was reading Plato in Greek.
As a toddler Weil developed an extreme fear of germs and couldn’t stand to be touched. She was also preternaturally clumsy. At school, she couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the others. She suffered from phobias, a sense of disgust provoked by certain foods, and by the idea of contamination. She had migraines. She was extremely myopic. Scholars have debated whether or not she was anorexic. She certainly had a neurotic relationship to food, was extremely thin and always wore clothes that hid her body. She wanted her family to treat her like a boy, sometimes even signing letters to them ‘your son, Simon’. She found the idea of being an object of desire repulsive, and dressed in an outlandish way. The poet Jean Tortel remembered her as ‘a kind of bird without a body, withdrawn, in a huge black cloak which she never took off and which flapped around her calves’. Weil never defined herself as a woman, any more than as a Jew.
She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1931, during the brief prewar period when the institution admitted women. (Simone de Beauvoir, a few years ahead of her, didn’t have the opportunity to apply.)Weil had an immense appetite for learning, was a natural teacher and a driven writer. She once said that she felt her mind was crowded by ideas clamouring to be expressed. Yet throughout her life, she insisted on taking on physical tasks for which she lacked the slightest aptitude. In another person this might be seen as selfish. She often became a burden on others. But for most readers, her writing – her intense examination of malheur (‘misery’ or ‘affliction’), the exploitation of workers, of power, violence, war, duties and the need for roots – transfigures all this. Weil writes about her experiences with luminous clarity. Her austere and difficult life lends authority to her thinking in a way other intellectuals can only dream of.
Yet that life depended to an astonishing degree on the support of other people, in particular on the quiet labour of her parents. In 1931, she took up her first posting as a lycée teacher in the small town of Le Puy in the Auvergne. Refusing to live on more than the entry-level salary of an elementary school teacher, Weil sent most of her wages to a fund for striking workers. She would happily have lived in a hovel, but Selma, who virtually commuted from Paris to Le Puy during Weil’s year there, found her a spacious flat with a bathroom, and persuaded one of Weil’s colleagues, Simone Anthériou, to share it. Weil had no practical sense, so her indefatigable mother saw to it that the two Simones got a housekeeper. Weil wanted to live like a worker, yet her phobias meant that she could only eat the most expensive cuts of meat. If she couldn’t get them, she would simply go without. Selma quietly made a deal with Anthériou: she would buy decent meat and Selma would secretly refund her. Simone herself never had any idea how much her food cost.
Weil earnestly wanted to share in the suffering of others. She spent her spare time as a teacher doing trade union work. In 1934-35, she took a leave of absence, and spent the autumn working on her syndicalist analysis of Marxism, later published as Oppression and Liberty. In December, she went to work on the assembly line at Alsthom, building electrical machinery. The work was dangerous and she was bullied by the foremen. Her lack of strength and dexterity made her accident-prone and she often failed to fulfil her quotas. She fell ill after a month and had to take six weeks’ sick leave. To help her recover, her parents took her to a sanatorium in Switzerland. As soon as she felt better, she went back to the factory, where she survived another month before she left (or was fired). Next she found work at Carnaud, making gas masks and oilcans; she was laid off after a few weeks. Then Renault hired her. At the end of August, she was fired. The experience of dangerous, physically exhausting and soul-destroying factory work forms the background to La Condition ouvrière, a collection of texts – journal entries, letters, brief essays – dealing with the way capitalism crushes the bodies and souls of workers. When Hannah Arendt read it in the 1950s, she thought it was the best thing ever written on the subject.
In August 1936, Weil crossed the Spanish border and made her way to Barcelona. There she managed to join a group of international volunteers in the small town of Pina de Ebro. Noticing her short-sightedness, her comrades at first refused to give her a weapon. But she demanded so vociferously to be allowed to carry a rifle like everyone else that they relented (though they prudently stayed out of range). One morning, less than two weeks after her arrival, she failed to see a vat of boiling oil on the ground and stepped into it, suffering terrible burns. After a few days, transportation was found to get her back to Barcelona. If her parents had not been waiting there, to provide treatment, food and rest, she might well have died. Towards the end of September, they finally persuaded her to return to France with them.
This became a recurring pattern. Weil acted on conviction, always with great courage and absolute determination. But in the background, her parents were ready to drop everything to make sure that she survived her attempts at living out her ideals. Gustave Thibon, a farmer and the editor of one of her most popular books, Gravity and Grace, thought that their ‘constant care ... put off the inevitable outcome’. The Weils themselves were perfectly aware of their role. ‘If you ever have a daughter,’ Selma said to Tortel, ‘pray to God she won’t be a saint.’ When people expressed sympathy for her parents, Simone would reply: ‘Another member of the Society for the Protection of my Parents!’
After Spain, Weil continued to work with trade unions, but she also became interested in Catholicism. She had mystical experiences in which she felt the loving presence of Christ, yet she refused to be baptised. She loved God, but she didn’t love the Church, with its persecution of anyone who refused to submit to its dogmas. Although it caused her great pain to remain outside organised religion, Weil refused to become part of a community defined by the excommunication of dissenters and the exclusion of the non-baptised.
In June 1940, the Weil family only just outpaced the German invasion, getting the last train out of Paris. They stayed in Marseille until May 1942, when they left for New York via Casablanca. In Marseille, Simone decided to work as a farmhand. She also asked Thibon, who had reluctantly agreed that she could work on his farm, to let her sleep outside, which he absolutely refused to do. In the end they compromised on an abandoned, half-ruined, rat-infested house owned by his wife’s parents.
As soon as she arrived in the United States, Weil campaigned to be allowed to join the Free French in London. She finally succeeded, and after a strenuous Atlantic crossing, and internment in Liverpool, she arrived in London in December 1942. When she died of tuberculosis and self-starvation in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, on 24 August 1943, she had been separated from her parents for nine months. In London she wrote day and night, far exceeding the pedestrian reports the Free French asked her to produce. Her output in this period was prodigious. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, her epochal study of what is required for us to feel at home in our society, was written during this time. When she was diagnosed with TB in April 1943, she hid her illness from her parents, filling her letters with pious lies. She didn’t mention that she had become too sick to work, and didn’t tell them she was in hospital. When she died, a telegram was sent to André in Philadelphia. He went to New York to break the news to his unsuspecting parents.
The last word Weil wrote in her diary before her death was ‘nurses’. While she might have been thinking of the nurses who attended her in her final days, it is tempting to see this as a reference to a project she had promoted since the war began – that the Allies should send volunteer nurses to the front lines. Since only the simplest care could be given in battle, they wouldn’t need to be highly trained. They would comfort the dying more often than saving the living. But the deeper purpose was moral: the white-uniformed nurses would serve as emblems of moral courage and symbols of Allied values, their femininity contrasting with the masculinity defined by the Totenkopf and the black uniforms of the SS. Naturally, Weil wanted to be among the first nurses deployed. She even took a First Aid course in preparation. When General de Gaulle heard about her plan, he exclaimed: ‘Mais elle est folle!’ Weil was deeply hurt by the dismissal of her idea.
A further disappointment followed when the Free French refused to send her on a mission into occupied territory. None of her superiors in London would entertain the thought. Her bad eyesight and clumsiness were well known. Some also thought her ‘physical type’ made her unsuitable. In other words: she looked too Jewish. The likelihood of her being caught – possibly jeopardising the lives of others – was too high. Although her good friend Maurice Schumann (later foreign secretary under de Gaulle) patiently explained why nobody in their right mind would send her on a secret mission, Weil reproached him. Why would such an intelligent woman fight so tenaciously for such quixotic projects? Maybe the answer is simply that they would oblige her to risk her life.
It’s hard to know what to make of Weil’s life and death. Christians see her as Christ-like in her suffering. Others may find her desire to help selfish and her insistence on doing work she couldn’t handle almost risible. Even Thibon admits that watching Weil try to do the dishes had him in fits of laughter. She knew perfectly well she was unsuited to practical work. But saints must often bear the ridicule of others. In her last years, she came to see the ‘extraordinary difficulty’ she had ‘in doing an ordinary action’ as a favour from God, because it kept her from attempting more self-aggrandising heroics. However strangely she did the dishes, Thibon was in awe of her presence, her luminous gaze, her ‘insistence on inner purity and authenticity’.
I am struck by her loneliness. She wanted to merge with the masses, to be anonymous and unobtrusive – a worker, a farmhand, a trade unionist, a soldier – one among many, working and fighting alongside others. Yet she found true solidarity hard to come by. Everywhere she went, she stood out. She was often the only woman; she was always different. Tortel notes that her purity inspired fear. Even her writings are not really about acknowledging the pain of others. They are, rather, about the complete eradication of the self in the service of the afflicted, who, precisely because of their affliction, have already had their own subjectivity obliterated. Weil’s only loving interlocutor is God.
What about? Weil’s ideas? There is no disputing their importance. Her thinking about affliction, attention, factory work, oppression and liberation, rights and obligations, and the need for belonging has been influential across political theory, moral philosophy and theology. She has inspired thinkers as different as Maurice Blanchot, Iris Murdoch and Giorgio Agamben. Wittgensteinians such as Peter Winch and Cora Diamond have felt kinship with her ideas about language and morality. The feminist philosopher Andrea Nye has suggested that Weil’s emphasis on obligations rather than rights might offer a way out of the impasse over abortion in the US. Thousands of ordinary readers interested in mysticism or Catholicism have found her books illuminating.
Others have found her thinking repellent. Sontag expresses relief that we can admire Weil without having to agree with her ‘anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilisation and the Jews’. George Steiner goes even further. He considers Weil ‘one of the ugliest cases of blindness and intolerance in the vexed history of Jewish self-hatred’. They have a point. She had an almost visceral loathing for ‘Hebrew’ and Roman culture, matched in intensity only by her deep veneration for ancient Greek culture and Catholicism. More than half of The Need for Roots is taken up with her passionate insistence that French culture and politics went awry as a result of the Romans. In Weil’s account, the Druids, who resisted the Romans, emerge as the unlikely heroes of French history.
In The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, Robert Zaretsky sets out to show that Weil’s ideas can still ‘resonate’ with secular readers today. He wants us to learn from Weil, but he also thinks that, undiluted, she is likely to send us running. His solution is to tone her down. The value of affliction ‘lies in the use we make of it. Whether it can teach us anything as grand as wisdom depends on how we define wisdom. If virtues like comprehension and compassion, toleration and moderation are to constitute at least part of wisdom, we could do worse.’ But Weil was never a champion of ‘moderation’. Zaretsky’s Weil becomes Simone of the Suburbs, a standard-bearer for traditional liberal morality.
In ‘The Love of God and Affliction’ (included in the essay collection Waiting for God), Weil writes that ‘compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility.’ The afflicted ‘have no words to express what is happening to them’. Affliction is different from suffering, for it mutilates a person’s whole being. In affliction, Weil writes, ‘a kind of horror submerges the whole soul. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very centre of the soul.’ We see examples of this every day: the homeless person on the street corner; the refugee stuck in a desolate camp or immigration centre; the trafficked woman suffering daily assaults by anonymous men. What can possibly count as the ‘wise use’ of such destitute lives, of such affliction?
One of Weil’s most passionate accounts of affliction can be found in her essay ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, written at the beginning of the Second World War. ‘Force,’ she writes in Mary McCarthy’s excellent translation, is ‘that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.’ Force is the power of ‘halting, repressing, modifying each movement that our body sketches out’. Because force is the ability to kill, it can make a thing out of a human being while he is still alive. ‘He is alive; he has a soul; and yet – he is a thing,’ Weil writes. Her example is the overpowered soldier in the Iliad: ‘A man stands disarmed and naked with a weapon pointing at him; this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him ... Still breathing, he is simply matter; still thinking, he can think no longer.’ Weil taught us how to think about the horrors of the Holocaust.
Her reflections on war are also reflections on slavery. ‘To be outside a situation as violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end ... Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity.’ Faced with absolute force, the slave is reduced to a thing. To say that a person is a thing, is a ‘logical contradiction’, Weil writes.
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n13/toril-moi/i-came-with-a-sword
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