Simone Weil (LIVES) - Hardcover

Du Plessix Gray, Francine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297646273 ISBN 13: 9780297646273

Publisher: W&N, 2001

Synopsis

Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909. Strikingly beautiful and intellectually precocious, she was reading the evening paper aloud to her family aged 5, quoting the seventeenth-century French dramatic poet, Jean Racine at 6 and, by her early teens, mastering classical Greek and several modern languages. She developed her acute social awareness during the First World War, refusing to eat sugar because the French soldiers at the front had none.

In 1936 Weil joined an Anarchist unit near Zaragoza, Spain, to train for action in the Spanish Civil War, but after an accident she went to Portugal to recuperate. There she had the first of several mystical experiences which led to her adoption of a theology that came close to Roman Catholicism (despite her Jewish heritage) and which was to become the subject of much of her writing. After the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War, Weil moved to the south of France where she worked as a farm servant. She escaped with her parents to the United States in 1942 but then went to London to work with the French Resistance. To identify with her compatriots, Weil refused to eat more than the official ration in occupied France. Malnutrition and overwork led to a physical collapse and, during her hospitalization, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died after a few months spent in a sanatorium, aged 34.

Weil's writings, which were collected and published after her death, fill about 20 volumes. As Francine du Plessix Gray shows in this eloquent and engaging biography, Weil was a moral idealist committed to a vision of social justice. Her writings explore her own religious life and analyse the individual's relation with the state and God, the spiritual shortcomings of modern industrial society, and the horrors of totalitarianism. This book is an elegant introduction to the life of one of this century¿s most unusual women whose passionate beliefs profoundly shaped modern French and English social thought.

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Review

In Simone Weil, Francine du Plessix Gray writes with her customary grace and acuity. The author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated At Home with the Marquis de Sade examines an equally extreme character at the opposite end of the moral spectrum in Weil. This French "mystic" (1909-1943) displayed early the ferocious intellect that took this daughter of affluent, highly assimilated French Jews to the peak of her country's rigorous educational system and made her an important modern philosopher. But Weil remains a beacon to activists because of her passionate, intensely personal commitment to the world's oppressed and her need to directly share their sufferings. This need had its neurotic aspects, and Gray's elegant biography does not gloss over Weil's lifelong anorexia, her distaste for physical contact, her peculiar brand of anti-Semitism or the unyielding self-righteousness that led her to cut off friendships for minor offences. Yet the overall tone is one of sympathetic respect for an extraordinary human being unable to develop the willed blindness that enables most of us to live comfortably while others go without. Weil gave up prestigious teaching jobs to do manual labour; she performed dangerous work in the Resistance; and, when threatened by a Vichy policeman who exclaimed angrily, "You little bitch, we'll have you thrown in jail with the whores!" she replied coolly, "I've always wanted to know that milieu." Her slow, exceedingly tentative movement toward Christianity grew from her need to affirm her solidarity with the world's "slaves", and her prescient denunciation of Communism at a time when most radicals embraced it, arose from her understanding that Soviet apparatchiks abused the working class just as egregiously as their putative opponents, the fascists. This is an outstanding introduction for general readers to the influential thought and rivetingly conflicted life of a seminal figure in 20th-century intellectual history. --Wendy Smith

Book Description

The life and thought of the French mystic, social philosopher and activist in the Resistance whose work profoundly influenced French and English social thought.

About this edition

• Publisher: W&N
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0297646273
• ISBN 13: 9780297646273
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208