In 1957, when Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm, a reporter asked him which writers he felt the closest to. He gave two names: his close friend Rene Char and the philosophical mystic Simone Weil. By that point, Weil had been dead for over a decade, but Camus, according to Robert Zaretsky in The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, didn’t consider her physical absence a “barrier between friends.” Camus edited the manuscripts Weil left behind after her 1943 death from tuberculosis during his short stint as an editor at the prestigious Gallimard publishing house. “The encounter,” writes Zaretsky, “left an enduring mark on Camus’s thought and writing. He grew close to Weil’s parents, remaining in touch with them even after he stepped down as an editor.”
The feeling of intimacy isn’t unique to Camus. People who read Weil’s writing, most of it published posthumously, tend to feel close to the author despite the fact that none of her major works, such as The Need for Roots or The Iliad: A Poem of Force, are autobiographical in any typical sense of the term. What draws readers into Weil’s writing is the clarity of her thought, conveyed in compact but translucent prose. It’s the seductive energy of a mind liberated by unselfconsciousness and totally enraptured in thought. Reading Weil is similar to the feeling we get seeing our favorite athlete effortlessly glide across a football field in a transitory but quite real burst of freedom, which we know was only made possible through years of unseen labor. Apparently Zaretsky, an eloquent and gracious writer in his own right, has felt it, too.
The subtitle of Zaretsky’s book, “A Life in Five Ideas,” hints at Weil’s essentially paradoxical nature. Born to a secular Jewish Parisian family in 1909, Weil had a number of mystic experiences that drew her toward Catholicism, and she was likely baptized shortly before her death. A leftist with socialist sympathies in her youth, she abhorred the Communist Party and, in fact, wrote a tract against political parties in general. She was a pacifist who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, an intellectual who read Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit but worked in factories and on farms. Above all, though, she was a once-in-a-generation mind who focused much of her energy on cultivating humility as an ethical principle.
Weil would have balked at the idea that we could learn anything worth knowing by studying her biography. And yet, since the integration of thought and action was at the heart of her intellectual project, it makes sense for Zaretsky to look to the details of her life in order to better understand her ideas. In The Subversive, he reduces her notoriously unsystematic philosophy to five major themes — affliction, attention, resistance, roots, and God — and shows us how Weil lived each of them out. It’s quite an ambitious project, but Zaretsky succeeds, and the result is what I believe to be the best introduction to Weil yet published in English.
One of the book’s standout chapters is “Paying Attention.” Attention comes up a lot these days, typically in the context of Big Tech harvesting and monetizing it. But what is attention? Contra the William James-inspired definition of attention as a conscious bearing down on a subject, Weil sees attention aas akin to meditation or a secular version of kenosis, the Christian practice of “self-emptying.” “Rather than concentrating our muscles,” writes Zaretsky, “attention involves the canceling of our desires; by turning towards another, we turn away from our blinding and bulimic self.” Attention, in this theory, is not “focus” but a kind of spiritual dilation that saves us from projecting ourselves on our object of contemplation. It allows us, as Weil wrote in Waiting for God, to be “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” If this sounds mystical, that’s because it is. If it sounds too mystical for practical use, keep in mind that Weil’s method of practicing attention comes in part from the spiritual exercises of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. Attention is as much an ethical practice as it is a mystical exercise, and it helps us, as Zaretsky writes, understand that “we all too easily confuse the world that is as it is for a world that is all about us.”
The Subversive is a slim biography as well as an explication of Weil’s ideas. For example, when it comes to “roots,” the subject of one of Weil’s major books, we learn about Weil’s work writing tracts for the French government in exile. In “resistance,” we read riveting stories about Weil’s disillusioning experiences “fighting” — she didn’t kill anyone and was sent home early after stepping in a pot of boiling oil — in the Durruti Column, the anti-Franco anarchist military unit, during the Spanish Civil War. And in “affliction,” we read about Weil’s tragic death, starving herself in an attempt to match the caloric intake of her fellow citizens living in occupied France, which left her particularly susceptible to the tuberculosis that eventually killed her at age 34.
Dying so young and just as she was really finding her footing as a writer and a Christian, it’s a small miracle that Weil attracted such a prestigious coterie of admirers after her death, including not only Camus but also Iris Murdoch and T.S. Eliot. It’s a testament to Zaretsky’s thoughtfulness that he doesn’t just mention her admirers but draws parallels between Weil and other thinkers. Too often, Weil’s admirers regard her as so unique that she doesn’t bear a resemblance to anyone else. But as Zaretsky argues, the themes in her work anticipate and echo those of some of the West’s greatest minds: the existential ethics of Camus, the practical clarity of George Orwell, Hannah Arendt’s division between work and labor, and Edmund Burke’s championing of rootedness. As The Subversive shows, it’s time that Weil took her place among these better-known luminaries.
Scott Beauchamp is an editor for Landmarks, the journal of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. His most recent book is Did You Kill Anyone?
