During the First World War, a six-year-old Simone Weil learned that soldiers on the Western Front were not rationed sugar, so she refused to eat it until conditions improved. But whereas most leave such zealous empathy in childhood, Weil’s commitment to suffering with — or, at least, in the same way as — others became the hallmark of her work as a philosopher and political activist, as well as of her short, harrowing life. And though her ascetic self-denial tended toward self-erasure, a theme she would reflect endlessly upon in her writing, she couldn’t help standing out. At the École Normale Supérieure, the elite Paris institution of higher learning where she was among the first generation of women to be educated, she was known as “The Red Virgin,” a testament to her asceticism, her communism, and, as her peers saw it, her scorn for femininity. (An improvement, perhaps, on “The Martian,” the sobriquet given to her by her lycée teacher, the radical pacifist philosopher, Alain.) Once, when her classmate Simone de Beauvoir argued that the point of political progress was not to provide for people’s needs but to help them find “the reason for their existence,” Weil countered, “It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry.”
After graduation, Weil took up several teaching posts, which she eventually abandoned to devote her life to the wretched and the oppressed. She found work in a factory, running machines that she was, as a sickly, near-sighted intellectual, profoundly ill-prepared to operate. After several months of risking injury and slowing production, she was fired. Undeterred, she found another factory, and then another, before she joined the anarchist Durruti Column in 1936 to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Her comrades tried their best to keep her away from weapons, and finally she was sent home after stepping in a vat of boiling cooking oil. In 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France, Weil fled to the United States at the last possible moment, and only because she knew that her parents, bourgeois Jews, would not leave without her. At the first opportunity, she returned to Europe, joining the French government-in-exile in London. When it became clear that written reports and office work would be the extent of her contribution to the cause, she returned to the form of solidarity she adopted as a child, eating only what rations were doled out to the French living under German occupation. Her body, already weakened by tuberculosis, buckled under the strain. She died at the age of 34 in a sanatorium in Kent, where she had been taken by well-wishers once she no longer had the strength to resist.
Her written works and her correspondence, almost all of which have been published posthumously, are an ongoing exploration of just the kinds of self-denial, tending toward self-abnegation, that would eventually bring about her demise. Despite her secular upbringing, Weil was drawn to monastic and mystical traditions in Christianity, on the basis of which she built out a singularly demanding constellation of thought. Between the twin concepts of affliction (malheur) and attention, Weil formulated a metaphysics of the strictest asceticism, in which the self is increasingly evacuated in the hope that it might become a vessel for the overflowing grace of God. She ranged over religious, political, and literary subjects, from the relationship between Christianity and the Roman Empire to the centrality of violence in the Iliad and the subsequent European tradition, always alert to how spiritual life was crushed under the weight of industrial modernity. She gives no quarter to comforting notions of progress, veering into the reactionary in her veneration of peasant life (as well as in her virulent, if complex anti-Semitism, a subject over which nearly all of her present-day commentators pass in silence).
But the hallmark of her thought is the exhortation to discipline and self-effacement, the impossibility of which is no deterrent to her insistence upon making every effort to reach it. A word that occurs frequently throughout her writing is the Greek “metaxu,” a preposition meaning simply “between”; for Weil (influenced by her reading of Plato) “betweenness” came to signify education, mercy, and grace, which allow the corrupt world to reflect, however darkly, the eternity of God’s goodness. “This world is the closed door. It is a barrier,” Weil writes. “And at the same time it is the way through.” Her way through, in her actions and on the page, was the way of torment, of cultivated loss, of the paradoxical hope (from the deep sources of Christian mysticism) that in the greatest depths of darkness, a light will be found shining.
Life and thought rarely correspond so closely; it is unsurprising, then, that Weil’s strained biography has long been a source of morbid fascination. In a 1963 review of a collection of Weil’s essays, Susan Sontag — echoing T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, André Gide, and others before her — identified in Weil a necessary corrective to the cult of power and progress in the modern world. Sontag argued that no one could possibly agree with Weil’s oracular pronouncements on religious renewal through self-erasure, much less take her advice, but that we must continue to read her because that very intensity offers a shock to the overly polite postwar liberal consensus. For Sontag, Weil was an otherworldly exemplar, the outer limit of spiritual and intellectual asceticism, emphatically not a role model. It’s an assessment that shaped much of the Anglophone perception of Weil’s life and thought through the end of the twentieth century.
Under more or less the same aspect, Weil haunted a few texts earlier this millennium, like Chris Kraus’s genre-blending essay Aliens and Anorexia (2000) and Anne Carson’s collection Decreation (2005). But a different Weil has appeared in recent years, especially after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, when she began to be marshaled as a figure who, as Robert Zaretsky declared in The Washington Post in 2019, “diagnosed America’s current political malaise.” In 2018, the French literature scholar Christy Wampole wrote in Aeon that “in a society whose most distinct feature is alienation, Simone Weil proposes ways to feel at home again.” In 2023, researcher Justine Toh argued in The Guardian that Simone Weil might just be the one to convince “the comfortable classes” to make the radical changes needed to save the world from ecological collapse. In a sordid twist of the kind social media has perfected, Weil has also become a mascot for misguided youths seeking to blend a fetishized Catholic ritualism with aestheticized eating disorders: memes and graphics free-associate Weil’s name and face with half-knowing coquettishness, inane religious references, and anorexia, mirabilis or otherwise.
Publishers have been paying attention. Last year, Bloomsbury published a thin, beguiling volume of Weil’s poems; in February, Penguin Classics brought out a new translation of The Need for Roots, a nearly three-hundred-page reflection on the needs and future of the European soul, and perhaps her most well-known work; and in August, Harvard released a collection of newly translated letters. Meanwhile, a full dozen books either about or drawing on Weil’s life and thought have appeared from major presses in the past five years, including: Karen Olsson’s The Weil Conjectures (2019); Robert Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil (2021); Costica Bradatan’s In Praise of Failure (2023); Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries (2023); Jacqueline Rose’s The Plague (2023); and Cynthia Wallace’s The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil (2024). This year has also seen Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction. Even in fiction, where sources of cultural trends are more difficult to trace, Weil has made appearances both oblique and obvious: Sigrid Nunez, who was introduced to Weil’s work by Sontag, her mentor, explores the ethical rigors of Weil’s thought in What Are You Going Through? (2020), while satirist Lars Iyer skewers the tendency to fetishize radical thinkers in My Weil (2023). The pattern continues: a recent Washington Post portrait of Zadie Smith’s office features “traces of her next novel” in the form of the “books by and about Simone Weil” that litter the novelist’s desk and bookshelves. “She’s in the air at the moment,” Smith explains.
She certainly is, and yet one senses in Weil’s reputation a sea change, all the more notable for its having gone unremarked-upon: far from the radical, self-denying extremist, the patron saint of outsiders, this new Weil appears as a model for engagement with the modern world, impressive yet approachable — even, to use the dread word, relatable. It is difficult to think of another example of a thinker of so firmly cemented a reputation undergoing such a transformation, the basic assumptions about what her life and thought offer not so much reevaluated as reversed entirely.
This reversal, and the contradiction it expresses — however negatively, repressively, unconsciously — are helped along by the facts of Weil’s biography, which remain as tantalizing as ever. Like scripture and statistics, they accommodate interpretation to wildly divergent ends. For writers recently drawn to Weil’s example, the strange, forbidding theologian-cum-activist has become a more welcoming figure: a fellow seeker, a friend.
Both Weil, born in 1909, and her brother André, born 1906, were recognized as brilliant from the start. Simone excelled in languages, logic, and philosophy, while André was a mathematical prodigy who went on to world renown for his contributions to number theory and algebraic geometry. In her hybrid biography-memoir, the novelist Karen Olsson leverages the Weil children’s lives to explore her own relationship with math, which she studied as an undergraduate before abandoning it for writing. As Olsson recounts, Weil fell into a terrible depression upon realizing that she would never have access to the absolute truth as André did in his equations. But Simone emerged from her despair convinced that she could access truth in her own way, through “strenuous faith” and “a discipline of attention.” Weil “wants to reconcile the abstract and the concrete,” Olsson writes, “to make philosophers and mathematicians of us all.” Olsson takes this lofty goal as inspiration to continue in a literary life, convinced that its virtues can be equal to those of creative calculation. Olsson’s is among the most personal of the recent evocations of Weil, and it bears all the virtues and vices of the kind of personal writing that has been in vogue this past decade or so. On the one hand, there is a tendency to solipsism, and a certain vagueness in spelling out the implications of the Weils’ lives and bodies of work, even for the first-personal narrator these materials are meant to illuminate. On the other hand, to animate and articulate the human experience of difficult thinking is itself a demanding and valuable task. Indeed, on its own, The Weil Conjectures might still be read as an important crack in the imposing edifice that kept us away from what George Steiner aspirationally called “non-hagiographic” readings of Weil.
And yet, the hopeful tone in which Olsson casts the facts of Weil’s life is striking, despite being tempered by references to the density of Weil’s writing, the arduousness of her life, the bafflement with which many of her contemporaries met her decisions. Olsson’s book follows a roughly biographical trajectory, switching back and forth between André’s life, Simone’s, and her own. “I know I wasn’t the only high-school girl to check The Simone Weil Reader out of the library,” she writes early on. “Saint Simone, herself an imaginary friend to who knows how many lonely teenagers of a certain era.” The Weil Conjectures is ultimately an exercise in Sisyphean (or perhaps just existentialist) optimism. Olsson writes that the Weils “found purpose in concentrated inquiry and likewise in the glimpse, the pursuit, the almost there, the exhilarations, the frustrations, of being partially shown and at the same time denied the dangling fruits of their searches.” If, then, as Olsson points out, she “can only follow either of them so far,” she is nevertheless cast in the same mold. However austere the demands of asceticism and truth, the self-annihilating openness to God, Weil comes across as simply a seeker, edgy and overwrought but essentially recognizable, guided not by her inner clarity but by the tenacity with which she pursues her ambition to understand. The subject matter here is, of course, of the highest elevation — mathematics, theology, and history, rolled into one — and Olsson expresses some admirable stoicism about the possibility of ever really grasping the truth, but the personal investment is American as apple pie: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try….
It’s not bad advice, but advice quickly turns sour when it becomes a mantra, rancid when it’s being sold. In our self-help culture, the resolutely uncooperative Weil has nevertheless been seized upon for lesson-extraction. Costica Bradatan’s In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility presents Weil’s life — alongside those of figures like Romanian essayist E.M. Cioran, the fascist novelist and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima, Seneca, and Mahatma Gandhi — as a series of teachable moments. Bradatan casts all of Weil’s missteps and misfortunes, her health trouble, her clumsiness, even her shocking death, as object lessons in the power of failure. Just one example: “Refusing to eat was something Simone Weil had been doing all her life, not just in these final days. She had lived off self-starvation — and thrived.”
Bradatan writes beautifully of the clarifying possibilities of failure, of its ability to strip us of our pretensions and hubris, but his insights are hampered by a constant insistence on capturing every aspect of Weil’s life and thought for his reader’s use. The language of problems and solutions is omnipresent, and his Heidegger-tinged reflections on the terror of human finitude lead to pop-psychological encouragement: “We come from the abyss, and the abyss is where we are headed, but simply falling into it is not a good option,” he writes. “We need to learn, on our own, how to find our way back so that we can find ourselves in the process.”
“Most of us, whether we know it or not, suffer from a peculiar condition: the umbilicus mundi syndrome, a pathological inclination to place ourselves at the center of everything,” he continues in this vein, “The good news is that there may be a cure for this condition.” The Weilian cure, he suggests, is her famous notion of “decreation,” a mystical practice of self-abnegation. It’s a difficult concept, rendering in ascetic terms the old Platonic idea of ontological participation — that is, that insofar as we exist, we are active members of the whole of being that is God. Bradatan ably condenses Weil’s innovation as follows: in creating us, “God ‘renounces being everything.’ Our move, in response, should be to ‘renounce being something.’” Like much of Weil’s thought, this is a radical and terrifying variant on a well-known Christian ideal (in this case, the concern for heavenly over earthly things) that goes long on the punitive and torturous and short on the creative and redemptive. “In relation to God,” Weil writes and Bradatan quotes, “we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold.” For decades, the reading of such profoundly misanthropic contemplation has ranged from tremulous awe to a resounding woof. Bradatan, eye on the ball, writes, “But how does decreation work in practice?”
Bradatan seems aware of the danger of this approach, and yet is unable to avoid it. He writes vigorously against the “fake failure” that is “peddled by self-help gurus,” a kind of failure that can only be seen as a “stepping-stone to success,” as opposed to “real failure,” which, he insists, “always humbles.” But Simone Weil was not humble. Her waspish rebukes of her peers, her refusal to accept the ordinary demands of social life, her insistence on casting herself into the maw of history, whatever the burdens it placed on herself and those around her — she may have wanted to annihilate herself in God, but she was hardly modest in her pursuit of that ultimate end.
Manufacturing a digestible version of a thinker as demanding as Simone Weil is, on first glance, far from an enviable task. And yet, when a market exists, supply will meet demand. Robert Zaretsky, an intellectual historian with an interest in popular exposition, distills Weil for the American reader, drawing out the core themes that, he argues, “still resonate today.” Throughout his explications of these themes, there is an inexorable drive to simple application. Consider Weil’s notion of attention. In the notes that were collected and published as Gravity and Grace, she writes, “Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious.” Training oneself toward radical openness, for Weil, is both an ethical responsibility and a metaphysical dilemma. How to become ever more the person who is to be ever more undone? Answers to such questions don’t come easy, if at all. As Weil put it: “The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon due to the horror of the void.” Zaretsky, undeterred, aims to illustrate this concept with the example of a panhandler on Texas’s I-45. As an ethical imperative, paying attention in the Weilian mode would mean being open to the struggles of the person sitting roadside and not seeking anything in return. The question, then, is not whether to give the panhandler a few dollars, but to ask them Weil’s simple, explosive question, “What are you going through?” That is, to attend to them in their personhood, to be there with and for them, as though their suffering were one’s own. If one can truly ask this question of anyone, one has become open to God’s grace: “Absolutely unmixed attention,” Weil writes, “is prayer.”
To live constantly in prayer, as Saint Paul enjoined the Thessalonians and as Simone Weil tried to do, is an apocalyptic injunction: in a very real sense, it will ruin your life. Zaretsky, as interpreter of Weil, makes no such demand on his reader. Instead, we get a litany of his self-protection from the terrifying questions she leads him (and us) to ask, as he shuffles through hypothetical interrogations of the person who might be there on the side of the road — “Aren’t those Ray-Bans he’s wearing? If he’s really homeless, why is he so clean-shaven? Why is the dog lying so quietly at his feet? Or: Is she drugged? And if she is feeding three kids, why is she overweight?” — betraying a basic presumption that these people are more or less interchangeable, the exact opposite of Weil’s demand to apprehend our “neighbors” as fully as possible, in their unique personhood.
Zaretsky knows this: the point of the chapter is to explore what it means to fall short of Weil’s call to attention once we, as her readers, have been exposed to it. He tells us that on occasions he has offered change to people standing on the highway, rather than asking them what they are going through. Worse still, he has done so for the sake of his observant children or imagined onlookers, rather than to further open himself to the divine light that comes through merely in the encounter with a wretched other. But what matters, he suggests, is that he is aware that he should ask whether he is “attending to the humanity” of the person, even when he fails to do so. “I do know the question is important,” he writes, “and I want my children to know this as well.” Less charitably, his reading of Weil has given his — and his readers’ — prevaricating the glow of an existential dilemma. To be haunted by Weil while speeding down the highway is, apparently, enough to be getting on with.
Zaretsky’s workaday portrayal of Weil’s ideas has been criticized by people like the scholar Toril Moi, who took him up on the example of the panhandler in a disparaging London Review of Books piece, calling his Weil “Simone of the Suburbs.” In a letter to the editor, Zaretsky objected that the main point of his book was to present Weil as a standard by which one might understand, if not shape, one’s life. Zaretsky calls his lens idealism, but I’m more inclined to call it accommodation, or perhaps domestication, an attempt — sometimes sincere, sometimes cynical — to strip a thinker of their unfamiliar or unduly demanding elements for the sake of accessibility and ready absorption by readers who would like to hear about some new ideas, but not at the risk of abandoning their own.
Domestication is a common practice in the Anglophone reception of dense, foreign, or bygone thinkers: Oxford’s popular Very Short Introductions series offers a crash course in nearly eight-hundred topics, including the works of many philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel to Simone Weil herself. These digests rest somewhere between interpretation and synopsis, often blurring the line between the two where debate might risk becoming contentious. Efficiency and simplicity have their obvious merits, and there is always a place for commentary, pedagogy, and hand-holding for the novice. But in the case of thinking, especially thinking about someone as complex as Weil — and, indeed, the Very Short Introduction to Weil is among the subtlest and most rigorous in the series — one wonders what the point of a pre-cleared path might be. It would be like being introduced to a foreign delicacy, and then having someone else chew it for you.
As much as the resistance to cultural pre-digestion might be simple snobbishness (which I may have just indulged in a bit of, myself), the temptation to reduction is, I submit, a genuine concern, especially when the market gets involved. For all of the American myths of rugged individualism, there is in our culture an equally if not more powerful drive toward hygiene, order, and censoriousness. We are, after all, the country that conquered the frontier and filled it with strip malls, cul-de-sacs, and, yes, highway intersections.
Our language is marked by this drive to contain, to make neat, so that great historical catastrophes become grist for the discursive, and book-selling, mill. In this mode, for good or ill, every theme becomes timely, every insight revealing, every resonance evidence of prescience — or, at the very least, instructive portents. In a 2023 Past Present Future episode on Weil’s 1943 essay “Human Personality,” academic David Runciman said that he suspects Weil would be an anti-vaxxer, if she were alive today. Emmeline Clein includes her in a diverse list of references including the movie Jennifer’s Body, “the aughts-era Tumblrverse,” and “the medieval canon of anorexic saints” in Dead Weight (2024), a book on the cultural narratives around eating disorders. Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries groups Weil in with a motley trio of contemporaneous thinkers — Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ayn Rand — whose lives become case studies in what Eilenberger calls “the power of philosophy in dark times.” Even the more sophisticated treatments of Weil’s work still offer up proclamations of her applicability. Jacqueline Rose quotes Weil on the “incredible amount of lying, false information, demagogy, mixed boastfulness and panic” exhibited by the public on the brink of the Second World War, and observes that she “could be describing the UK in the throes of Brexit, or the US, faced with the ascendancy of China, or Vladimir Putin as he wages war in a desperate attempt to restore Russian glory and stave off a similar fate.”
Some of the interest in Weil can be traced to the general intellectual land-grab of anti-Trump liberals, who have been eager to snap up past thinkers for guidance or, failing that, ballast in the tempestuous waters of contemporary politics. Given the rise of a new reactionary international vanguard, the obvious historical font for comparative resources has been the vast archive of political and social thinking from the decades surrounding the Second World War, especially in the societies that made up the Axis powers. It’s telling that Weil has risen to new prominence in the same moment as Arendt: both are safely dead, safely female (and so, it is assumed, feminist); perhaps above all, both are so safely historical in their antifascism that readers can pick and choose what to apply and what to allegorize, what to take as eternal truth and what to dismiss as being simply of their time, or their unique, unreproducible personality.
There is a yawning void at the center of the Weil resurgence, an absence that should startle anyone familiar with her thought: her incorrigibly religious sensibility. This is not to suggest that Weil’s religion is in any way easy to discuss. Though her paternal grandparents kept kosher, by the time she came around, the Weils had fully embraced the dominant secular humanism of the French Third Republic. She approached faith through her twin fixations, the wellsprings of the Western tradition and the ubiquity of human suffering. Like many intellectuals of her generation, she was drawn to religious texts as an alternative to the reigning positivism of French academic life. But it was not until a series of revelatory mystical experiences beginning in 1935 that Weil embraced an eccentric variant of Christianity that emphasizes the anguish of human finitude, the extremity of Christ’s sacrifice, and our obligation to emulate it. Salvation, insofar as it is included, is presented as all the more agonizing in its total incomprehensibility.
Though widely read by Christians and indeed an ardent believer — in her letters she unequivocally proclaimed her love for Jesus — Weil was never baptized, preferring to remain without institutional affiliation. This independence, which some might read as a sign of ambivalence, in fact represented an intensification of Weil’s religious commitment. She wrote that “it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception,” in order to more fully embrace the affliction that was, to her mind, the surest path to God and communion with all creation. Her refusal to be included within a structure the authority of which she nevertheless affirms is at the heart of Weil’s thought, and its religious potency: her thinking is perhaps most radical in its striving to confirm old ties and obligations, a constellation which we embrace as greater than ourselves, even as we accept that we are, in large part, its makers.
In all the popular writing about Weil, there’s still very little on her religiosity: its syncretism, its relation to various heresies, its role in the workings of her thought, where it places her in the European tradition. It is tempting to pin the dearth of analysis on widespread 21st century religious illiteracy. Many of the more abstruse sources of Weil’s religious sensibility, from the neo-Augustinian heresy of Jansenism to modern interpretations of medieval Catharism, would be totally unfamiliar to most readers today. Gnosticism, the early Christian sect of which she is often seen as a latter-day representative because of her radical separation of the earthly from the heavenly, is among the least understood terms in the contemporary religious lexicon.
But the critical obstacle to reckoning with Weil’s religion is the need to face up to our own religious attachments to her. However secular we proclaim ourselves to be, our behaviors and beliefs follow unmistakably religious patterns: we constantly produce new icons, new saints, new ascetic practices and festivals of indulgence, new wellness trends and entertainment cycles. Our political and legal culture is preoccupied by endless debates not only over the interpretation of sacred documents, but the intentions of the quasi-mythical men who wrote them. And in our literary culture, we attend to a pantheon of writers who are elevated by a cult of celebrity and dragged down by a cult of accessibility, whether as human-all-too-human narcissists, or else as victims of past idolaters who sacrificed the person for the sake of the image. But iconoclasm is every bit as religious as iconography, and each serves as the necessary condition for the other. The current Weil resurgence, which is bent on making her approachable, applicable, and useful, depends for its effect on her erstwhile status as the “patron saint of outsiders.” In our late hour, when the shit has so conspicuously hit the fan, it is reassuring to know that we can extend to the far reaches of human possibility, capture those who reside there, and draw them back into the fold of liberal domesticity. And if, in doing so, we strip Weil of her eccentricity, her strangeness, her faith — everything that makes her at once repulsive and magnetic — so much the better. We’ll keep sanding down jagged edges until we get a comfortable grip.
