“Every being cries out silently to be read differently,” observed the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil.[i] Yet too often Weil herself is read as a problem to be solved. For instance, Judith Thurman’s recent New Yorker essay approaches Weil’s life and thought as one of “Supreme Contradictions,” exemplified by what Thurman characterizes as a “conundrum of the philosopher’s biography that most basic human needs were alien to her.”
This insistence on Weil’s alienation often persists even in more nuanced readings of Weil, such as Jacqueline Rose’s 2022 New York Review of Books essay “An Endless Seeing.” Rose’s subtitle to that essay pronounces Weil as hostile to the “earthly sphere of existence, which she held more or less in steady contempt.”
And yet, a capacious orientation to Weil’s own understandings of the world reveals that her concerns were not so much with the world itself, but with the intertwining of domestic oppression (of workers, of cultures, of communities) and global colonization (of nations, of others). If we can recognize her acute sense of the interplay of domestic and global forces, Weil may well guide our present reflections.
Simone Weil was a philosopher of religion who could be described as “waiting for God,” but this did not preclude her from the human condition. Her political analysis often started from the most basic human needs, such as hunger and a sense of belonging—part of what in her last book she calls a “need for roots.” Overall, her insistence on asking of the other “What are you going through?” suggests an infinitely more complex consideration of embodiment and relationality than “alienation” or “contempt”.[ii]
Rather than starting from a diagnostic superficiality of her image, a seemingly inevitable lure as evidenced by the myriad books about Weil that display her photo on their cover, when we really dwell with Weil’s writing in relation to her self-fashioning, what emerges is how profoundly she sought a more engaged connection with the world. “[I have] escaped from a world of abstractions,” she writes to a former student about leaving her teaching job to work in a French factory, “to find myself among real men…some good and some bad, but with a real goodness or badness.”[iii] Her writing consistently reflects her attempt to understand—materially and otherwise—what is real and what is true.
Although the intricacies of her thought are evident on close reading, her essays and notebooks themselves offer a striking clarity at a time when French theory was becoming more esoteric. Indeed, she sought to teach and engage the widest possible public in her writings, which were directed towards multiple readers (factory workers, migrants, the French elite—sometimes all at once). She worked formally as teacher, ran adult-education classes, attended the trials of immigrants, joined union meetings, danced at a miners’ ball, and rhapsodized about Brandenburg concertos. She was not estranged from her life; she was interested in its incommensurabilities and, like the concertos, its infinite variations.
Perhaps most importantly for our times, Simone Weil refused to understand colonial wars as external to the domestic life of France or other empires. “[I]t is painful,” she admits, “to feel oneself to be guilty through involuntary complicity.”[iv] She was willing to go to prison to call out French colonialism: “A life sentence would not hurt me more than the impossibility in which I find myself of thinking the cause of France is just.”[v] What is likely to happen to such a country is its due, she asserted—captured in the old idea of karma, “sadly forgotten by us,” she noted, an idea “identical to…the Greek idea of nemesis, meaning the automatic punishment of excess.”[vi]
By the end of her short life, Simone Weil knew she would be read as an eccentric, and she cautioned against such categorical shortcuts: neither a clown nor an eccentric, neither a saint nor a sinner. Rather than the “injustice of imagining that I affect saintliness,” she suggested she was a tragic fool possessed of humor.[vii] Indeed, she was never unaware of her reception, and she was able to sport fun at herself for it equally well.
For instance, the Director of Studies at the Normale, who disagreed with her political activities, gave her the name “red virgin” as an insult. She insolently acknowledged him by sending him a postcard of a famous local landmark—of the enormous bronze statute known as the Red Virgin—from her first teaching post. Her use of her nickname to tease the one who invented it also challenges the reading of Weil as a humorless and sexless, caricatures of women thinkers of which she was well aware.
As one of Weil’s commentators put it, the insight Weil accumulated in her short lifetime “was won at the price of nameless degradation…the power to utter it and then being listened to by nobody.”[viii] If we gave our attention, as she so famously requested, how might we distinctly read her?
In these theses, we suggest starting points for reading Weil against the popular grain; we read her as a committed political philosopher who acted in the world with, as she put it, “particular notions of happiness.”[ix] If at the moment it is despair that we bear, she reminds us that happiness can be found in our continued engagement.
- Simone Weil lived out a “queer form.”[x] Weil offers a non-normative model of gender, which should be read different from a mere rejection of hers. She gave a queer performance in many aspects of her life: she dressed like a man at a time when it was illegal to cross dress, but she didn’t seem too attached to being man or woman; she published essays at a time when law forbid publishing the writings of Jews, but those essays were unfavorable toward both Jewish people and Judaism. As she taught in her own method, sitting with these contradictions would be more fruitful than rejecting them as incoherent. As we begin to read her, one place to start is at Weil’s understanding of herself as a philosopher. As her beloved Plato said in his Republic, if you stay with philosophy for a long time—as opposed to just using it to get an instrumentalized education—you are likely to become strange, eccentric, queer (487c-d).
- Simone Weil sought intimacy through friendship, conversation, and earthly attachments. On friendship, she wrote that it may be the one exception to the “duty of loving only universally.”[xi] And, as her friends said about her, “Of all the things belonging to material life, tobacco was the only one which she was almost certain to accept.”[xii] She did indeed love to smoke with others, itself a sensual experience of taste, smell, and community—and almost always of political conversation. In the late 1930s, on Monday evenings at the smoky Café de Flore for instance, she argued vehemently against merit-based scholarships at French schools, which she thought would only increase inequality and social imbalance.[xiii]
- Simone Weil was politically prescient, but not because she slept on the floor. To rail against the norm extracts tremendous social and psychological cost. Weil was one of the first Europeans to question European colonialism. Getting to this conclusion involved putting every part of herself through rigorous critique, including the fact that she was French, Jewish, a woman, a philosopher, an intellectual, a person born to wealth, a daughter, and a sister. None of those parts of her facticity survived that critique in anything resembling normalcy. This follows from her beloved Aeschylus, who said that suffering begets wisdom. It also anticipates the reflexive turn in various academic disciplines, shedding light on the fact that academic philosophy in her time (and ours) had yet to go through this self-critical turn.
- Simone Weil held contraries together in a striking “negative capability.” She wrote in a notebook, “Method of Investigation: as soon as one arrived at any position, try to find in what sense the contrary is true.”[xiv] And, at another juncture, she asked: Why should we not consider honestly “the contradictions essential to thought instead of vainly trying to brush them aside”?[xv] In other words, Weil offers a way, as Stuart Hall put it, “to come into the world of contradiction,” that is, “to come into the world of politics.”[xvi] Staying with these tensions might be another way to reason through these times.
- Simone Weil’s vision of her own embodiment is not evidence of her insanity. That we tend to pathologize her earnest attempt to refuse oppression reflects less Weil’s “madness” and more our patriarchal and misogynistic society’s tendency to diagnose and dismiss, rather than think with and learn from, women as they thought themselves—regardless of their contributions to political philosophy.[xvii]
- Simone Weil examined her own attachments to nationalism and fascism; she asks us to do the same. She wrote, “In a human being, the personal is a thing in distress, it is cold, it runs about looking for a refuge and for warmth.”[xviii] So often these very human needs are nationalized and instrumentalized in ways none of us may predict. She admitted in a letter to her father: “I am aware of very strong gregarious tendencies in myself. My natural disposition is to be very influenced, too much influenced, and above all by anything collective. I know that if at this moment I had before me a group of twenty young Germans singing Nazi songs in chorus, a part of my soul would instantly become Nazi…in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose.”[xix] Our task today is to build a community worthy of the name, one that would allow us to turn our need for refuge and warmth “to good purpose.”
It has never been a better time to be a reader of Simone Weil in English. Readers interested in continuing a deeper reading of Weil’s life and work would do well first to consult her own words in recent editions of her writing such as Oppression and Liberty, Selected Essays, Waiting for God,and the new translation of The Need for Roots. Readers could also consult a number of excellent recent commentaries, such as Lissa McCullough’s The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil, Jane Doering’s Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force, and Kathryn Lawson’s new Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil. For a portrait of Weil in literature, see the work of Sigrid Nunez, especially The Last of Her Kind and What Are you Going Through. Finally, we also include some of our own work from which we draw these thoughts: Benjamin Davis, Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins and Helen M. Kinsella, “Of Colonialism and Corpses: Simone Weil on Force,” in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler (eds.), Toward a History of Women’s International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
[i] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 135.
[ii] For this question, see Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), p. 115.
[iii] Simone Weil, Seventy Letters, trans. Richard Rees (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1965), p. 11.
[iv] Simone Weil, “Letter to Jean Giradoux,” in Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, ed. J. P. Little (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 78.
[v] Ibid., p. 79.
[vi] Ibid., p. 78.
[vii] David McClellan, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Poseidon, 1990), p. 272.
[viii] Quoted in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (London: Penguin, 2005),p. 2.
[ix] Quoted in Simone Weil: A Life in Letters, eds. R. Chenavier and A. A. Devaux (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024), p. 153.
[x] For this concept, see Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (New York: New York University Press, 2022).
[xi] Weil, Waiting for God, p. 98.
[xii] J. M. Perrin and Gustave Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Routledge, 1953), p. 120.
[xiii] See McClellan, Utopian Pessimist, 126.
[xiv] Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 102.
[xv] Quoted in Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, ed. Eric O Springsted (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), p. 36.
[xvi] Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Essential Essays Vol. 2: Identity and Diaspora, ed. David Morley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 80.
[xvii] See Patricia Owens and Katharina Reitzler (eds.), Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
[xviii] Simone Weil, “What is Sacred in Every Human Being?,” in Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, p.111.
[xix] Simone Weil, “Letter II: Same Subject,” in Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 52-53.
