How to Read Simone Weil, Part 2: The Activist / Cynthia Wallace

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

“What are you going through?”

This was one of the central animating questions in Simone Weil’s thought that pushed her beyond philosophy into action. Weil believed that genuinely asking this question of the other, particularly the afflicted other, then truly listening and prayerfully attending, would move us toward an enactment of justice and love.

Simone Weil believed that any suffering that can be ameliorated, should be.

In this episode, Part 2 of our short series on How to Read Simone Weil, Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion and Evan Rosa discuss the risky self-giving way of Simone Weil; her incredible literary influence, particularly on late 20th century feminist writers; the possibility of redemptive suffering; the morally complicated territory of self-sacrificial care and the way that has traditionally fallen to women and minorities; what it means to make room and practicing hospitality for the afflicted other; hunger; the beauty of vulnerability; and that grounding question for Simone Weil political ethics, “What are you going through?”

We’re in our second episode of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes—and a deep and lasting influence that continues today.

In this series, we’re exploring Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist. And what we’ll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life, are deeply unified in her way of being and living and dying.

And on that note, before we go any further, I need to issue a correction from our previous episode in which I erroneously stated that Weil died in France. And I want to thank subscriber and listener Michael for writing and correcting me.

Actually she died in England in 1943, having ambivalently fled France in 1942 when it was already under Nazi occupation—first to New York, then to London to work with the Free French movement and be closer to her home.

And as I went back to fix my research, I began to realize just how important her place of death was. She died in a nursing home outside London. In Kent, Ashford to be precise. She had become very sick, and in August 1943 was moved to the Grosvenor Sanitorium.

The manner and location of her death matter because it’s arguable that her death by heart failure was not a self-starving suicide (as the coroner reported), but rather, her inability to eat was a complication rising from tuberculosis, combined with her practice of eating no more than the meager rations her fellow Frenchmen lived on under Nazi occupation.

Her biographer Richard Rees wrote: "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.

In going back over the details of her death, I found a 1977 New York Times article by Elizabeth Hardwick, and I’ll quote at length, as it offers a very fitting entry into this week’s episode on her life of action, solidarity, and identification with and attention to the affliction of others.

“Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant, and original minds of 20th century France, died at the age of 34 in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation—an action undertaken at least in part out of wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. The year of her death was 1943.

“The willed deprivation of her last period was not new; indeed refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga is that with them the deprivations and rigors‐are undergone for the pay‐off—for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life—or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Well it was entirely the opposite.

“It was her wish, or her need, to undergo misery, affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest. Thus around 1935, when she was 25 years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, were then the modem equivalent of “slavery,” and she survived in her own words as “forever a slave.” What she went through at the factory “marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression teat there must be a mistake....”

[Her contemporary] “Simone de Beauvoir tells of meeting her when they were preparing for examinations to enter a prestigious private school. ‘She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre outfits. ... A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept. . . . I envied her for having a heart that could beat round the world.’

“In London her health vanished, even though the great amount of writing she did right up to the time she went to the hospital must have come from those energies of the dying we do not understand—the energies of certain chosen dying ones, that is. Her behavior in the hospital, her refusal and by now her Inability to eat, vexed and bewildered the staff. Her sense of personal accountability to the world's suffering had reached farther than sense could follow.”

Last week, we heard from Eric Springsted, one of the co-founders of the American Weil Society and author of Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.

Next week, we’ll explore Simone Weil the Existentialist—with philosopher Deborah Casewell, author of Monotheism & Existentialism and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the UK.

But this week we’re looking at Simone Weil the Activist—her perspectives on redemptive suffering, her longing for justice, and her lasting influence on feminist writers. With me is Cynthia Wallace, associate professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion.

This is unique because it’s learning how to read Simone Weil from some of her closest readers and those she influenced, including poets and writers such as Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and Annie Dillard.

About Cynthia Wallace

Cynthia Wallace is Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion, as well as **Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering.

About Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.

Show Notes

• Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion
• Elizabeth Hardwick, “A woman of transcendent intellect who assumed the sufferings of humanity” (New York Times, Jan 23, 1977)
• Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering
• The hard work of productive tension
• Simone Weil on homework: “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
• Open, patient, receptive waiting in school studies — same skill as prayer
• “What are you going through?” Then you listen.
• Union organizer
• Waiting for God and Gravity & Grace
• Vulnerability and tenderness
• Justice and Feminism, and “making room for the other”
• Denise Levertov’s  ”Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus”
• “Levertov wrote herself into Catholic conversion”
• “after pages and pages of struggle, she finally says: “So be it. Come rag of pungent quiverings,  dim star, let's try  if something human still can shield you, spark of remote light.”
• “And so she  argues that God isn't  particularly active in the world that we have, except for when we open ourselves to these chances of divine encounter.”
• “ Her imagination of God is different from how I think  a lot of contemporary Western   people think about an all powerful, all knowing God. Vae thinks about God as having done exactly what she's asking us to do, which is to make room for the other to exist in a way that requires us to give up power.”
• Exploiting self-emptying, particularly of women
• “Exposing the degree to which women have been disproportionately expected to sacrifice themselves.”
• Disproportionate self-sacrifice of women and in particular women of color
• Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Borne: ethics that care for the other
• The distinction between suffering and affliction
• Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Hunger”
• Embodiment
• “ You have to follow both sides to the kind of limit of their capacity for thought, and then see what you find in that untidy both-and-ness.”
• Annie Dillard’s expansive attentiveness
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and attending to the world: “ to bear witness to the world in a way that tells the truth about what is brutal in the world, while also telling the truth about what is glorious  in the world.”
• “She's suspicious of our imaginations because she doesn't want us to distract  ourselves from contemplating the void.”
• Dillard, For the Time Being (1999) on natural evil and injustice
• Going from attention to creation
• “Reading writers writing about writing”
• Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.”
• Writing as both creation and discovery
• Friendship and “ we let the other person be who they are instead of trying to make them who we want them to be.”
• The joy of creativity—pleasure and desire
• “ Simone Weil argues that suffering that can be ameliorated should be.”
• “ What is possible through shared practices of attention?”
• The beauty of vulnerability and the blossoms of fruit trees
• “What it takes for us to be fed”
• Need for ourselves, each other, and the divine

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Cynthia Wallace
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Liz Vukovic, and Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give