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. The implied tension between the otherworldly and the extremely worldly-engaged has resulted in Weil being portrayed in a series of pithy descriptors that often emphasise her saintliness and separation from the mundane. André Gide called her the patron saint of all outsiders, Camus claimed that she was the only great spirit of our times, Levinas said that Weil ‘lived like a saint and bore the suffering of the world’, and T. S. Eliot could only recommend that readers ‘expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints’ (Eliot 1952, vii); although he does later qualify this statement. The tendency to focus on her otherworldliness lends credence to Sontag’s lament that ‘we read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their “views.”’ (Sontag 1963). Weil is described as alien and as radical, even if it qualified as ‘both in the sense of “unconventional”’ and of ‘returning to essential roots’ (Rozelle-Stone and Stone 2009, xxv). On a whole, biographers of Weil tend to lurch between using a series of contradictions to describe her or,2 as de Lussy does, insist that it is possible to discover a coherence in her mad life and death (Lussy 2021, 8)
That desire to discover a coherence has resulted in more attention has been paid to whether Weil has a consistent philosophy. Originally disregarded in favour of dramatic biography and mystical aphorisms, her thought has begun to be examined as philosophy rather than as a contribution to mystical thought or theology. However, in doing so, efforts have been made to temper her thought, or to secularise it. There have also been studies as to whether her thought is consistent, and if not, how it could be made consistent. Again, biography plays a part here as well: events such as Weil’s mystical experiences, beginning in 1935, and her giving up a particular kind of political engagement in 1937/8 often serve as markers in understanding and elaborating possible ‘turns’ in her thought. On the other hand, it has been confidently asserted that ‘to an exceptional degree, the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment, and reflection from one single whole’ (Chenavier 2012, 5), and the task of some philosophical commentators on Weil has been to find the key to that single whole.
It is in this search for coherence amidst the contradiction that I am interested in exploring the way in which Weil explores a key contradiction: between what she sees as the enslaved nature of humanity and the desire for freedom. For Weil, this manifests politically in acts of madness - or acts that seem mad in comparison to the rationality of the world. 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. Therefore, 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 explore how Weil understood the lack of freedom afforded to humanity, and her way beyond it, and conceptualise for the first time what I call her 'strategic' madness: one which she realised both politically and philosophically.
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.