Photo – Wikimedia Commons
An evening of reading, music, dance and conversation about the French writer, philosopher and activist Simone Weil. April 14, 2019, Arts + Lit Lab. Thanks to all in the standing room only crowd. Perhaps we left with more questions than we came with … perhaps that is the way it should be. Essays by UW Professor Rachel Brenner and poet Rita Mae Reese are at the end of the cast list.
Readers – The Iliad or the Poem of Force
Sonia Baku
David Simmons
Musician
Eva Paddock, bass
Dancer
Akiwele Burayidi
Discussion leaders
Dr. Rachel Brenner, Professor, UW Center for Jewish Studies
Rita Mae Reese, poet, Co-Director, Arts + Literature Laboratory
Thanks to all who donated to make this show possible.
From left: Rita Mae Reese, Akiwele Burayidi, Rachel Brenner, Eva Paddock
Sonia Baku David Simmons
Two very contrasting views of the life, work and beliefs of Simone Weil:
The Imperfect Sainthood of Simone Weil: The self-sacrifice for the afflicted other and the denial of her Jewish roots
by Rachel F. Brenner, Professor of Jewish Studies, UW-Madison
The thinker who all her life preached the recognition of the afflicted other failed to recognize her own affliction – the misery brought forth by her being a Jew. The denial of her Jewishness underlies Weil’s lifelong desire for the obliteration of the egotistical, possessive self, total self-renunciation.
Weil’s focus is on the concern for the other supersedes all personal, self-centered considerations. Only obliteration of identity enables total acceptance of the afflicted other.
The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer takes place when the soul empties itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is in all his truth. (“Human Personality,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (1977), 315).
Weil’s aspiration for affliction and martyrdom
Her return from New York back to Europe in 1942 due to her sense of guilt and betrayal of self and France
The “Plan for an Organization of Front-Line Nurses.”
The proposition to be parachuted behind the front lines and become the scapegoat in the
Total ultimate sacrifice for France
“Every time I think about the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.” (Waiting for God, (1951), 72).
In view of her desire for self-obliteration through total attention to the afflicted, her hateful attitude toward Jews is quite bewildering:
Her hateful attitude toward the Jewish people:
The Jews – that handful of uprooted individuals – have been responsible for the uprooting of the whole terrestrial globe… Capitalism and totalitarianism form part of this progressive development of uprooting… The Jews are the poison of uprooting personified. (The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 1976, 575-76.)
Her comments about deported Jews
The deported Jews of the Rhineland fell quickly into filthiness, and indescribable degradation. Women who only a little time previously had been ladies relieved themselves everywhere, in front of the barracks, within them. (quoted in Thomas Nevin, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew, (1991), 243).
Her view of the Jewish minority after the war
The existence about Jewish minority does not represent a good thing; the objective must be to bring about its disappearance through the encouragement of mixed marriages and a Christian upbringing. (quoted in Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, (1976), 509.)
In her 1940 letter to the Vichy minister of national education concerning the Statute of Jews, she denied any Jewish connection claiming that the statute which defined a Jew as a person who has three or more grandparents did not apply to her because her grandparents were freethinkers. She affirmed
If there is any religious tradition that I regard as my patrimony, it is the Catholic tradition; the Hebraic tradition is alien to me, and no Statute can make it otherwise. I always adopted the Christian attitude as the only possible one. I might say that I was born, grew up and always remained within the Christian inspiration. (Simone Weil Reader, 80).
Why didn’t Weil convert to Christianity?
In 1940 Weil wrote,
Certainly I belong to Christ… but I am kept outside the Church by philosophical difficulties which I fear are irreducible.
First, becoming a member of the Church through baptism would have restrained her individual freedom, a constriction she could not bear.
There is a Catholic circle ready to give an eager welcome to whomever enters it. Well, I do not want to be adopted into a circle, to live among people who say ‘we’ and to be part of an ‘us.’ (Seventy Letters, 155.)
Second, the baptism could have implicate her as a “cowardly” Jews trying to escape the Final Solution, an allegation she could not bear.
Third, while the Church declares itself to be the pinnacle in human spirituality, Weil repudiates the Christian notion of the inferiority of the pagan religions that preceded the Church.
One identical thought is to be found in the ancient mythologies, philosophies, and the Greek stoics… in Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita… Therefore, for Christianity to become truly incarnated… it must first of all be recognized that historically, our profane civilization is derived from religious inspiration which, although chronologically pre-Christian, was Christian in essence. (Seventy Letters, 155).
The Church had inherited the ambition for greatness from Israel and Rome, and under this influence, the Church, through missionary zeal, had become totalitarian, colonizing power on its own right. Rome is long gone. But the universal prefiguration of Christ’s Passion would have severed Christianity from its Jewish sources. The reconstruction of the Christian doctrine would have given her a new identity, free of any trace of her Jewish origins.
Critical Reactions to Weil’s attitude toward Judaism
Father Perrin recorded that he “was struck by her hostility toward the Jewish people.” (quoted in Gilbert Kahn, ed. Simone Weil: Philosophe, historienne et mystique (1978), 54)
- Thibon remembers that Weil had “a kind of ideological and religious repulsion regarding the Jews.” (ibid. 159)
- Viard’s attributed Weil’s anti-Jewish attitude and here refusal of baptism to her universalist politics. (ibid, 157)
Conor Cruise O’Brian explains her attitude in terms of her antipolitics and her radical rejections of all limited associations. (George Abbott White, Simone Weil: Interpretation of a Life (1981), 103.
Robert Coles claims that “Weil’s outrageous, unqualified generalizations about the Jews seem at least understandable in the context of a world almost ready to destroy itself” (ibid. 31)
- M. Cameron claims that despite her misinterpretation of the biblical tradition Weil “remains one of the most remarkable women of our time, one who can be placed with Teresa of Avila and with the two Catherines, of Genoa and Sienna.” (ibid. 45)
Vladimir Rabi claims that her despite everything “she is ours” – that is, she belongs to the Jewish people. (quoted in Kahn, 154)
Emmanuel Levinas concedes that “Weil was accused of ignoring Judaism and, my word, she ignored it in a royal way. Yet no doubt she was more Jewish than she believed she was.” (Levinas, Difficult Freedom (1990), 133; quoted in Kahn, 141)
Thomas Nevin claims that Weil was a tzeddik [sic], the righteous person “kicking against the pricks of Judaism and struggling for the oppressed.” (Nevin, 389).
Conclusion
Was she really “ours” not only in the sense of belonging to the Jewish people, but “ours” as belonging to the adherents to the humanistic ethics and values of equality and justice?
Can her hatred for the Jews be seen as “kicking against the pricks of Judaism” and compared to her lifelong struggle for the oppressed?
While there is no doubt about Weil’s absolute dedication to the struggle for a just and oppression-free world, it is also impossible to doubt her hatred for the Jewish people whose tradition she wished to erase from history.
I cannot answer the questions that these contradictions raise. But I will say that her disavowal of the Jews and the Jewish tradition at the time of the Final Solution, which was erasing the Jews from history, requires rethinking Weil’s saintly reputation as a martyr for the afflicted.
A Third Reading of Simone Weil
by Rita Mae Reese, poet and Co-director of the Arts + Literature Laboratory
What does Simone Weil have to offer us in our current moment? When I first started reading Weil, I thought that her struggles with fascism and Nazism were, as she would say, mere historical documents. I was, of course, naïve, maybe willfully so.
A friend of mine told me she used to work on the anorexia ward of mental hospital and that Simone Weil was considered “the devil.” Weil can be read both as feminist and anti-feminist, both as Jewish and anti-Semitic (or at the very least as anti-Judaic). She is a radical liberal who has recently been claimed as inspiration to the far-right party in France. She is seen as an intellectual and moral giant, and also as a pathetic neurotic who starved herself to death.
She believed that there should be no gap between one’s beliefs and one’s actions. She was a radical thinker, in the sense of going back to the roots, to ferret out aims and errors. Her last writings, in fact, were in fact collected as The Need for Roots, the publication of which was brought about by Albert Camus, one of her great admirers.
Camus believed her thinking was essential to the rebuilding of Europe after WWII, and I wonder if it could be helpful to rebuilding America as well.
For instance, her view of rights really being obligations looked at the other way round could prove useful in the arguments around some of our most contentious issues, such as gun control. Your right to life is my obligation to respect your life, and my right to life is your obligation to respect my life. Americans, I think, frequently are impatient with context, and prefer to see rights as “God given,” in fact they are entirely meaningless except in the context of community.
Her thoughts on attention—that absolute attention is a rare gift and a form of prayer—resonate deeply for many, particularly in an age when each individual seems to value her attention too little, to control it too little, and corporations value it too much.
Then, of course, there is her idea of suffering, which was important to the poet Adrienne Rich among others. Here’s Weil’s words on the value of suffering:
When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: “It is the trade entering his body.” Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the universe, the order and beauty of the world and the obedience of creation to God that are entering our body. After that how can we fail to bless with tenderest gratitude the Love that sends us this gift?
(We might also believe that OSHA guidelines should protect worker safety and there should be universal health care for treating said body that the trade has entered into. That aside, I find it helpful to think of how suffering can be transformed into a greater good.)
Too, her thoughts on justice—the view that the criminal is a person who has placed himself outside of the bounds of community and that the role of justice is to restore him to community, are illuminating. This seems the opposite of our American justice system.
And then there is the issue of force, with which the Fermat’s Last Theater performance engaged most directly, specifically with Weil’s reading of force, of her displacing Achilles as the hero of the epic, and of replacing him with force itself. Force is a major theme in American life. Many of us understand it primarily through movies, through games, social media, news, and sometimes through books and we believe we are experts. We sit in judgment of those who handle force, imagining with no real basis that we could handle it better, without thinking deeply what uses of force mean, about how access to force can change you, about how difficult it is to wield with restraint. We forget that force can intoxicate and deform those who wield it, and none of us have a special immunity.
In her writings on force, Weil was in part at least responding to Hitler’s reading of the universe as a force that, with perfect indifference, crushes everything in its path. She believed that force could be countered, and even defeated, with love, and with supernatural grace.
The other night, a friend was talking with me last night about cancellation culture—our impulse to erase people who have committed crimes from our lives and from, in a sense, the public record. We want the whole world to un-friend that offender. It is a new ostracism, but the same old scapegoating, where we pile the sins of the community onto the goat not sacrificed and then release it into the woods beyond the border of the state, except now the state extends in all directions. Maybe this is because we do have a sense of attention being the greatest gift we can give, and the desire to withhold from someone unworthy. Perhaps, though that doesn’t seem to hold true (we give our attention most often to the least deserving, it seems). I think it’s a desire toward justice, yes, to wield the lever of attention as the only force we seem to have, but also a dangerous impulse to “purify” ourselves of things that might somehow implicate us all.
Near the end of her life she was working out a notion of reading, of our sensory perceptions being something like the blind man’s stick. She used this term because “at each instance of our lives, we are struck, as if from the outside, by meanings which we ourselves read into appearances.”
So how should we “read” Simone Weil, both in the usual sense and in her sense of that word? She wrote about a conquered king led in disgrace through the streets and how his subjects read him still as a king but the conquerors and the townspeople see him as a slave. She argued that dialogue would be essentially futile, because neither side would adopt the view of the other. This, of course, resonates today in a deeply divided country where common ground seems nearly impossible to find. But Weil argued that “an effort could lead them all to a third reading, the same for all.” This would be a reading that encompassed all perspectives, one that eliminated self-interest and ego to arrive at a view that encompassed beauty and justice.
This is not simply a “fair and balanced” reporting where all sides, no matter how insincere or factually based, are heard, but an attempt at context that does not negate any invested parties. It abandons false equivalencies and attempts to establish a hierarchy of readings. It is not simple and it is not quick. It privileges community over individual, and so is a hard sell. But it might provide the key for healing divides which otherwise could prove fatal.
There are numerous reasons to cancel Simone Weil, but she is also, as Adrienne Rich pointed out about Gravity & Grace, a neglected resource, one that might make us see ourselves, and each other, both more clearly and more compassionately.
As the poet Muriel Rukeyser once said, we need to use all of the resources at our disposal.
THE END