Selected Excerpts

from New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 2022), pp. 58-61 (6,286 words)(reviewing Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (U. Chicago Press, 2021)).

[On madness & genius]

“[T]he epithet of ‘madness’ has constantly trailed her, mostly coming from those who could not fathom her, including Charles de Gaulle, who came to know of her through the papers on resistance that she wrote in London in the last year of her life.

And yet it is central to Weil’s unique form of genius that she knew how to identify the threat of incipient madness for the citizens of a world turning insane. A straight line runs through her writing from the insufferable cruelty of modern social arrangements—worker misery, swaths of the world colonized and uprooted by “white races,” force as the violent driver of political will—to the innermost tribulations of the human heart. What would it mean, under the threat of victorious fascism, not to feel that you might go crazy?”

[Image of Justice as a woman]

“She was haunted, she wrote, by the idea of a statue of Justice—a naked woman standing, knees bent from fatigue, hands chained behind her back, leaning toward scales holding two equal weights in its unequal arms, so that it inclined to one side. . . . . As so often in Weil’s writing, it is almost impossible not to read this image as a reference to herself, although her political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence, which she held more or less in steady contempt. She may have been sculpting herself in her dreams, but her template was universal. Justice was for all or for none. . . . ”

“The fact that Justice was a woman was not incidental. According to Simone Petrément, her biographer and one of her closest friends, Weil’s mother told her that killing to prevent a rape was the one exception she made to the commandment against murder. Much later, she took the image of a young girl refusing—with an “upsurge” of her whole being—to be forced into prostitution as the model of a true politics. Antigone and Electra were Weil’s heroines, both belonging to the Greek lineage in which she sourced the cultural values she most cherished in the modern Western world. (She translated central passages from Sophocles’ plays.) Antigone in particular she returned to at the end of her life, for her appeal to an unwritten law that transcends natural rights—which, as she saw it, always sink to the individual claim. The Greeks, she insisted, had no notion of rights: ‘They contented themselves with the name of justice.'”

[Justice as elusive]

“A central question that has vexed so much political thought becomes why justice is always so elusive. Weil’s struggle with this question makes her a psychologist of human power.”

[Mystic and activist]

“A recurring principle in pretty much every stage of her writing from start to finish, the concept of justice renders futile any attempt—though many have tried—to separate Weil the mystic from Weil the activist, or Weil the lover of God from Weil the factory worker, who felt that the only way to understand the wrongs of the modern world was to share the brute indignities of manual labor, which reduced women and men to cogs in the machines they slaved for.”

[turning point in Weil’s thinking]

“If there was a turning point in her thinking, 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 immersed her leg in a drum of burning oil, or because, to her credit, as I see it, she was useless at aiming a gun.”

[Creature of analogy]

“By her own account, she is a creature of analogy, starting with perhaps the most vexed of them all—between Hitler and ancient Jerusalem, or Nazism and colonialism. Analogies are deceptive (trompeuses), she wrote in 1939, but they are her ‘sole guide.'”

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— Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.