Strategic Madness: The Resistance and Challenge in Simone Weil's Religious Philosophy

Although now primarily known as a philosopher and a mystic, Simone Weil was more well known in her short lifetime as an engaged political actor. One of her many concerns was with how contingent and yet persistent social structures contributed to oppression, and led to political systems that perpetuated what she referred to as force. Indeed, her analysis of power and power structures reveals for her that normal action, and normal thinking, can never fully interrogate or overcome our own desire for power and the exercise of that power against others and ourselves. Weil's response to these concerns, in both her life and her writing, was to identify the madness of action and thought, and embody that as far as possible as an example that no one could follow. This paper will conceptualise for the first time what I call her 'strategic' madness: one which she realised politically and philosophically.