The Vexation of Weil

Simone Weil is a vexation. An intellectual in the French Cartesian tradition who bore witness to her experience of Christ's presence (in November 1938); a radical who called “the destruction of the past... perhaps the greatest of all crimes”; a left-winger who penned trenchant critiques of Marxist thought and state socialist practice; a social theorist who condemned human collectives as a Great Beast yet yearned for a working class movement from “below;” Weil defies the usual categories. Embracing the role of outsider, she charted an almost perversely lonely course. Certain facts of her life, her mysticism, her apparent devotion to Catholicism (to which she never converted), a harsh asceticism that figured in her early death, prove stumbling blocks to many

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