Abstract
I first encountered the work of Simone Weil as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late 1970s. I was assigned to read The Need for Roots as part of a course on the history of Christianity, and read it I did, though with little comprehension. How far removed I was from the deeply fragmented reality of Europe in World War II that had given rise to this impassioned plea for a new, spiritually vital and sustainable social and political order. And how little feeling I had for the deeper currents of Weil’s thought that informed this late work. Still, it moved me and awakened something in me that I have never forgotten: a sense of how deeply bound we are to one another and of our obligation to pay attention to this communitarian truth. And I have continued reading Weil’s work ever since, drawn to but also sometimes frightened by the piercing, uncompromising beauty of her thought, especially her powerful sense of the fundamental obligation to pay attention to God and neighbor, and her commitment to inquire into the causes and costs of our inattention.
More than seventy years after her death, her work still feels necessary and important. Still, she is not always easy to read or understand. Nor is it always possible to situate her thought on a given question within a coherent or systematic framework; or to understand how the circumstances of her life and the way she lived her life—always shifting, often immensely difficult, and rarely certain—shaped her thinking. So too the contradictions (or paradoxes) that mark both her life and thought often seem utterly irresolvable. Which is why Robert Zaretsky’s fine, discerning book on Weil’s life and thought is so helpful and welcome in this moment. For those who are new to Weil’s thought, it can serve as a lucid and balanced introduction to her life and work. And for those who have been reading Weil’s writing for many years, it will I suspect offer welcome perspective and depth of understanding that can help illuminate the meaning and significance of her work.
The title Z. gives to his work is telling and important: The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. This is not, strictly speaking, a biography; and Z. notes with appreciation the important biographical work that has already been undertaken by Simone Pétrement and Francine du Plessix Gray, among others. But neither is it only an analysis of Weil’s thought. Z. attempts something more complex and compelling, lifting up five recurring concerns from Weil’s work—affliction, paying attention, resistance, the need for roots, and the search for God—as a way of exploring the meaning of her life; and considering carefully the historical and biographical contexts in which these ideas arose in order to understand better what they meant for Weil and what they might mean for us: a life in five ideas. As for the subversive character of Simone Weil’s life and thought, the author returns to this idea repeatedly, suggesting that Weil’s consistent habit of challenging and subverting (often to the exasperation of friends and colleagues) widely accepted philosophical, religious, and political ideas that she found insufficiently pure or lacking rigor and depth can be understood as a leitmotif of her life and thought.
Readers have a way of seeing in Weil what they want to see: mystic, philosopher, worker’s advocate, political theorist, and more. One of the great virtues of Z.’s treatment of Weil is his capacity to keep all these different dimensions of Weil’s life and thought in conversation with one another. Not necessarily in balance, but in conversation, resisting the temptation to identify her too closely with any one idea and asking whether these key ideas, taken altogether, can help us better understand what moved this remarkable and complicated woman and why her thought still moves us. Each of the five chapters is strong, offering a clear sense of how Weil came to think about certain ideas in the way she did and why it matters. The first two chapters, on “Affliction” and “Attention,” offer a perceptive and critical assessment of two of Weil’s most important and original ideas and reveal the reach, severity, and moral depth of her thought. But it seems to me that the two middle chapters—“The Varieties of Resistance” and “Finding Roots”—which are also the longest in the book, represent what Z. finds to be the heart of Weil’s life and thought: the depth and power of her ethical-spiritual vision and the impact of that vision on social and political action. It is here that Z. himself feels most deeply engaged with Weil’s thought and where his treatment of Weil’s thought opens out onto something like a political philosophy. The final chapter, entitled somewhat awkwardly, “The Good, the Bad and the Godly,” is for me the least satisfying in the book. This is perhaps in part because of its exceedingly difficult subject matter: Weil’s beautiful, but often dense, forbidding and paradoxical thinking about God, especially the mystical character of her thought. There is more to be said about this than Z. is willing or able to venture here.
This book deserves a wide readership, not least because of the help it can offer us in addressing the moral-spiritual crisis of our own time. More than a few times, Z. looks out onto the contemporary world and notes with amazement how resonant Weil’s thought remains in this moment—in particular the depth and integrity of thought that she brought to the questions of how to attend with care and devotion to God and to one another, and how to resist the soul-destroying ideas and practices that threaten to undermine this fundamental obligation.