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The Hands of Simone WeilAuthor(s): Françoise MeltzerSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2001), pp. 611-628Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344316Accessed: 07/06/2010 23:29

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The Hands of Simone Weil

Frangoise Meltzer

Philosophy is to reflection what the work of the hands is to action. - Simone Weil, "On Thought and Work"

As Marx notes, social, productive labor is man's (and woman's) essential activity and leads, in principle, to human self-development and fulfillment. It is not surprising, therefore, that for the self-proclaimed communist Simone Weil, work and working conditions would be central to her philosophy. The hedonist notion-that the pursuit of pleasure and idleness is the fundamental goal of human being (as argued, for example, by Russell and Hume)-was as alien to Weil's thinking as was amusement (or leisure) for its own sake in her short life. But we must be careful not to confuse her life with her philosophy (a difficult task, as any work on Weil will attest). What she argues for in defense of "man," she very rarely accords herself. She takes great pains to deny herself the duties that we owe every living being, duties that she actually catalogues in "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations."' But even for the rest of humankind,

A shorter version of this article was first given as the Nuveen Lecture at the University of Chicago divinity school and at Johns Hopkins University. I am grateful for the helpful and insightful comments I received in both of those forums. I profited immensely as well from a course on Simone Weil that I cotaught with David Tracy at the divinity school a few

years ago and am grateful to him for his generous reading of this essay. Finally, special thanks to Jay Williams, editor extraordinaire, and to Joshua Yumibe.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. See Simone Weil, "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations," trans. Richard Rees,

Simone Weil: An Anthology, trans. Rees et al., ed. Sian Miles (New York, 1986), pp. 201-10.

Critical Inquiry 27 (Summer 2001)

? 2001 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/01/2704-0005$02.00. All rights reserved.

611

612 Franfoise Meltzer The Hands of Simone Weil

Weil counters Hume's ideal life of contemplation with attention, a far more rigorous and intense form of meditation. "Extreme attention is what con- stitutes the creative faculty in man."2 Moreover, attention is not to be con- fused with will; it is rather bound up in desire (here Weil is strongly influenced by her reading of the Stoics). Attention specifically requires the passivity of the I and the disappearance of the subject: "Attention alone, that attention which is so full that the I disappears, is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call 'I' of the light of my attention and turn it onto that which cannot be conceived."3 Attention then (which in its highest form is prayer) entails great energy, toil, struggle, fatigue. It is described, in other words, in the language usually associated with labor or work. Indeed, Weil's form of contemplation is only possible through work: "Only through the experience of labor do I meet, together, time and space, time as the condition, space as the object of my action."4 As she argues in the brief essay "On Thought and Work," the realization that work is a necessity comes at the same time as the appearance of freedom.5 My purpose, however, is not to account for Weil's ideas on labor and self- fulfillment but rather to argue that the reception of her thought, which considers the religious and the Marxian as two irreconcilable strains, has failed to see that her ideas on work provide a ground for demonstrating a coherence and indeed a strange synthesis between these two strains.6

2. Weil, "Attention and Will," Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (New York, 1952), p. 170.

3. Ibid., pp. 171-72. 4. Quoted in Simone P6trement, La Vie de Simone Weil, 2 vols. (Paris, 1973), 1:146. 5. See Weil, "Sur la pensee et le travail," Premiers ecrits philosophiques, ed. Gilbert Kahn

and Rolf Kiihn, vol. I of Oeuvres completes, ed. D'Andre A. Devaux and Florence de Lussy (Paris, 1988), pp. 378-79.

6. There have been a number of articles on Weil and work, although not in the direc- tion I attempt to go in this essay. See, for example, Eugene Fleur, "Le 'Social' dans La Condition ouvridre," Cahiers Simone Weil 7 (Dec. 1984): 341-46; Rene Prevost, "La Philosophie du travail chez Charles P6guy et chez Simone Weil," Cahiers Simone Weil 7 (Dec. 1984): 350-59; Robert Chenavier, "Civilisation du travail ou civilisation du temps libre? Actualite de la pensee de Simone Weil," Cahiers Simone Weil 10 (Sept.-Dec. 1987): 238-54, 406-17; See also Louis Patsouras, Simone Weil and the Socialist Tradition (San Francisco, 1991), and Lawrence A. Blum and Victor J. Seidler, A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (New York, 1989). Finally, see Clare Benedicks Fischer, "The Fiery Bridge: Simone Weil's Theology of Work" (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, 1979).

Frangoise Meltzer, coeditor of Critical Inquiry, is professor and chair of the department of comparative literature and professor in the department of romance languages and in the divinity school at the University of Chicago. Author of Salome and the Dance of Writing (1987) and Hot Prop- erty (1994) and editor of The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis (1988), she has just completed For Fear of the Fire:Joan ofArc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001).

Critical Inquiry Summer 2001 613

It has been easy to dismiss Weil's life, except as a curiosity, a life that defies norms of almost every sort and has thus generated a large number of hagiographic or scornful biographies. Despite such statements as the

acutely gendered one by George Steiner in The New Yorker that "Simone Weil was, undoubtedly, the first woman among philosophers,"' or T. S. Eliot's (in his introduction to The Need for Roots) that Weil is "a kind of

genius akin to that of saints,"8 or even Camus's remark that The Need for Roots is one of the greatest books to come out since the liberation of France-9 and these are but random examples of the many in praise of

her-despite much acclaim and great, if perplexed, enthusiasm for her

thought, Weil's specific writings on work have been testily banished from the three arenas out of which she thought: Marxism, theology, and philosophy.

Weil famously spent nearly a year (1934-35) in sweatshops and factories and in their description.10 In 1933, she had requested a leave of absence from teaching for personal studies. She wanted to experience firsthand the life of the factory worker, whose rights she had so passion- ately championed. Her writing repeatedly asserts, both from the perspective of the factory worker and from that of the intellectual, that (skilled) manual work is the prerequisite for attention because it allows for the union of action and thought. With Bacon, Weil believes that only when matter is accepted as an obstacle to thinking can the will be liberated."1 But the stupefying conditions in the modern factory, with its production

7. George Steiner, "Bad Friday," The New Yorker, 2 Mar. 1992, p. 91. The article is, among other things, a review of Thomas R. Nevin, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-exiled Jew (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1991). Noting that Yiddish was a language that Weil "ignored or might have despised," Steiner concludes his essay by adding, "she was also a transcendent schlemiel."

8. T S. Eliot, preface to Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind, trans. Wills (Boston, 1955), p. vi. Eliot almost immediately takes it back: "Perhaps 'genius' is not the right word," he muses because one can disagree so violently with her. But she had a "great soul" and was one "who might have become a saint." He adds, pensively, "A saint can be a very difficult person: I suspect that Simone Weil could be at times unsup- portable" (ibid).

9. "Mais ce livre [L'Enracinement], un des plus importants, a mon sens, qui aient paru depuis la guerre ...." (Albert Camus, Oeuvres completes, 9 vols. [Paris, 1983], 4:91).

10. See Weil, La Condition ouvriere (Paris, 1951), hereafter abbreviated CO; and the

subsequent, more theoretical Oppression and Liberty, trans. Wills and John Petrie (Amherst, Mass., 1973).

11. Although Weil's critique of capitalism relies a good deal on Marx, her notion of work is also classical: Francis Bacon's idea that nature can only be conquered through obedience, for example, was a clear influence on her thought. Nevin says that she assigned Bacon's aphorism natura enim non nisi parendo vincitur as a dissertation topic when she taught at Roanne. See Nevin, Simone Weil, p. 395. Nevin cites Weil's "Meditation on Obedience and

Liberty," Oppression and Liberty, pp. 140-46. The essay alludes to Bacon's notions as well, although very obliquely. More obviously Baconian is Weil's notion that the philosophy of work is materialism: "Action which meets an obstacle gives us matter. Matter is something which imposes an inevitable order on our actions. Everything is matter except thought,


lines, repetitive action, and unskilled labor invariably render attention an impossibility, which was an outrage to Weil. The factory, as Weil was

constantly to complain, with its numbing work and enormous physical demands, destroys the mind. In "Sketch of Contemporary Social Life" from Oppression and Liberty, Weil writes: "Technical progress and mass production reduce manual workers more and more to a passive role; in in-

creasing proportion and to an ever greater extent they arrive at a form of labour that enables them to carry out the necessary movements without

understanding their connection with the final result."12 A page later we read that contemporary society suffers from an "inversion of the relation between means and ends-an inversion which is to a certain extent the law of every oppressive society-here becomes total or nearly so, and ex- tends to nearly everything." The result: "Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines."'3 Weil's own factory work was in- tended to demonstrate to herself her conviction that assembly line work

prevents attention in her sense, indeed, prevents thought altogether. Over and over again, the journal she kept during her factory work attests to her crushing fatigue and inability to think.14 And yet attention for Weil is only possible through work. The paradox is for her one of the pro- found scandals of high capitalism.

If attention is only possible through work, attention is itself a form of labor-of the mind and soul-a work of thought that is the right of

every human being to exercise. Indeed, Weil follows her teacher and mentor, Alain, in believing that thinking itself is labor. Thought is a battle, says Alain: "The outside invades and thought stands on the ramparts."'5 Weil writes to a student during her factory experience: "For the reality of life lies not in sensation, but in activity-I mean activity both in thought and action" (CO, p. 34). She does not echo Nietzsche's critique of episte- mological models. Unlike him, Weil holds that physics and mathematics underlie everything in the world. Nietzsche's statement that the faith on

which seizes upon necessity. Materialism is inconceivable without the notion of mind" (Weil, "Sur la pensee et le travail," pp. 378-79). What is retained from Bacon in Weil is the idea that obstacle is necessary to liberation and, ultimately, attention.

12. Weil, "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression," Op- pression and Liberty, p. 110.

13. Ibid., p. 111. 14. Throughout La Condition ouvriere Weil describes factory work as the death of the

soul, destruction of the mind, slavery of the worst sort, and so on. For example, during her

factory days, she wrote to her friend Albertine Thevenon, "In order to put oneself in front of one's machine, one must kill one's soul eight hours a day, one's thought, feelings, everything." She adds, "This situation causes thought to shrivel up, to withdraw just as flesh withdraws before a lancet. One cannot be conscious" (CO, p. 28).

15. Quoted in Gabriella Fiori, Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Joseph R.

Berrigan (Athens, Ga., 1989), p. 32; hereafter abbreviated SW


which our belief in science rests is still a metaphysical faith is not only one with which she agrees, but which for her carries no inconvenience. She wrote that there was an analogy between work and geometry,16 and her work will be understood completely only if one takes into account the extent to which her models and metaphors rely on physics (her use of the term force is but one of many examples). She believes, with Plato, that

geometry is the purest form of rationalism; in her words, that relation is to mathematics what force is to history. Force is here understood both as the living energy of meaning (as in Hegel), or even as human will (Kant); but she borrows from physics as well, where force is the doctrine of opposing tensions, according to which it is a primary aspect of physical reality and a regulative element in the universe (Heraclitus). Force is what is called today a force field, where, philosophically, the universe is seen as a vast system ruled by the interaction of energies (as it was for the Stoics, who abandoned Aristotle's model of contiguity). In her famous article on the Iliad, Weil writes that force is the equalizer, the symmetry of blindness:

Such is the nature of force. Its power to transform man into a thing is double and it cuts both ways; it petrifies differently but equally the souls of those who suffer it, and of those who wield it."7

16. See, for example, her Cahiers, and in particular notebook 5, vol. 6 in 2, ed. Alyette Degraces et al., Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1994), 6:2:164-278. These are filled with mathemat- ical formulas and proofs, which serve also as analogies to Weil's philosophical analyses. In notebook 6, she writes, "Mathematics is the capacity rigorously to reason on the non-

representable" (6:2:384). 17. Weil, "The Iliad, Poem of Might," trans. Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler, Simone Weil

Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York, 1977), p. 173. In the passage cited, I have

changed the translation "might" back to "force," which is the word Weil used. Moreover, as I hope is obvious from the discussion here, "force" has a particular history in philosophy which "might" does not.

As to the philosophical tradition offorce, I will mention only a few aspects here, which were of most importance to Weil. Heraclitus has a doctrine of opposing tensions according to which force is the first aspect of physical reality and is a regulative element in the universe. Plato's principle of motion is relegated to the world soul, while Aristotle (whom Weil disliked intensely) holds a fairly modern notion of a dynamical concept of force. The Stoics' notion of the universe as a vast system ruled by the interaction of forces (which is surpris- ingly similar to the modern notion of force fields) abandons, as I have noted, Aristotle's model of contiguity (a mover and a moved). This is the view that is probably closest to Weil's. Hegel mentions force as essential to tragedy: "The genuine content of tragic action

subject to the aims which arrest tragic characters is supplied by the world of those forces which carry in themselves their own justification, and are realized substantively in the voli- tional activity of mankind" (G. W. E Hegel, "Tragedy as a Dramatic Art," in Hegel on Tragedy, trans. E P B. Osmaston et al., ed. Anne and Henry Paolucci [New York, 1962], p. 46). In more contemporary discourse, one might fold Freud's notion of Nachtrdglichkeit (deferred action), unwilled remembering, into this economy, along with the fort/da game he mentions in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"; see Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James


Weil is neither an antipositivist nor a positivist. In this sense she is not a modernist (I am thinking here of Rabinbach's use of the term),'8 although much of her writing resonates astonishingly with that of Walter

Benjamin. But if we think of modernism as, among other things, the re-

pression of seventeenth-century scientific discoveries (of which modernism would see positivistic doctrines as the sinister return), then Weil is

rigorously antimodernist. She takes literally Descartes's cleavage of mind and body-indeed, her notion of attention insists upon such a separation. Of course, it is more complicated than this, as theorists such as Ste-

phen Kern, Marshall Berman, and Eugene Lunn have noted.19 But it is Husserl, for example, in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental

Phenomenology who writes that Descartes's method is absurd because it

argues that the whole world can be thought in the analogy of nature. Simmel, Lukaics, and much of the Frankfurt school make similar argu- ments.

Weil shares modernism's rebellion against commodification. But she is for rationalization, for the notion of objective truth, and does not hold Adorno's belief that modernism's retreat from work and exchange leads to a retrieval of art. On the contrary. Weil critiques modernism on the

grounds that modern life makes the mind and body strangers to one another so that the "spirituality of labor" is lost. The "three monsters of

contemporary civilization," she argues, have become "money, mechaniza- tion, algebra"; the unconscious has taken over.20

And, as several theorists have noted, positivism contributes to how the body is perceived, even among those modernists who reject its scientific optimism. Helmholtz and Marx, for example, see the body as a field of forces capable of endless transformations, linked to the cosmos and to the productivity of work. It has to be remembered that science itself was never seriously questioned in fin-de-si&cle France, and the convergence of culture and labor must be seen in this historical perspective. This, too, Weil critiques: modern science is based on abstract analysis; it has lost its connection to manual labor. For Weil, work is a metaphysics that bridges the gap between the conscious subject and the fixity of the world: "I am always two: on the one hand, the passive being who is subjected to the world, and, on the other, the active being who has a hold on it; geometry

Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 18:7-64. In "Force and Signification," Jacques Der- rida plays on many of these resonances; see Jacques Derrida, "Force and Signification," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 3-30.

18. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, 1992).

19. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983), Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: A Historical Study of Lukdcs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley, 1982), and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

20. Weil, "Algebra," Gravity and Grace, p. 209.


and physics lead me to conceive how these two beings can be joined, but

they do not join them."2 Geometry and physics, then, but not the abstrac- tions of algebra.

Unlike many philosophers on work, Weil does not affirm the body to be a motor (as did in fact Descartes), a notion that is carried through the more chilling varieties of modern theory on the subject such as Taylorism or the science of work in general.22 Despite the promised liberation of the

body by automation (prophesized by Marx and more recently by Andre

Gorz),23 the body remains a central focus of power for Weil and the social relations of the workplace the laboratory capable of providing a cure for work-related ills. But the body for Weil is more like Hegel's notion of

Ausserung: the outwardness of being; and the machine for her mimes the

energy of the universe. The machine, she writes, liberates thought, unless the work is assembly line, which abases the worker. But that, she adds, is not the machine's fault.24

Part of the difficulty in reading Weil lies in this use of labor/political concerns and vocabulary (machines, the body, work, factory conditions, the assembly line, production) coupled with a religious vocabulary (prayer, god, soul, universe) and a philosophical rigor that sublates both

registers into a metaphysics of work. This metaphysics, significantly (but with the inevitability of all work theory), is grounded in the twin concerns of idleness and fatigue. If, as Rabinbach notes, fatigue is both a pathology and a prophylaxis against the demands of modernity, for Weil fatigue is so as well but for completely different reasons. Fatigue as pathology emits

inevitably from alienated labor: "No poetry concerning the people is au- thentic," she writes, "if fatigue does not figure in it, and the hunger and thirst which come from fatigue."25 It is a prophylaxis in that it confirms the absence of idleness and the insistence on attention in her sense. In her own writings, fatigue is finally inextricable from work-whether it be manual work of the hand (Freud's repetition compulsion rendered literal on the assembly line) or that other, more subtle movement of the hand, writing. We will return to the hand in a moment. For now, however, I want to insist (again) that it is in the concept of work and its human product, fatigue, as Weil understands them, that the two contrapuntal strains in her thinking, Marxism and Catholicism (both of her own brand), can

21. Weil, "Science et perception dans Descartes," Premiers icrits philosophiques, p. 209. 22. See Weil's comments on Taylorism in the text of her lecture, "La rationalisation,"

Ecrits historiques et politiques, ed. Geraldi Leroy, vol. 2 in 2 of Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1988), 2:458-75.

23. See Andre Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work, trans. Malcolm Imrie

(Boston, 1985). 24. "Ce qui abaisse le travail, ce n'est nullement la machine elle-meme, c'est le travail

en sdrie" (Weil, Cahiers, 6:1:111-12). 25. Weil, "The Mysticism of Work," Gravity and Grace, p. 236; hereafter abbreviated

" MW."


be understood as a necessary (and willfully unresolved) dialectic in her philosophy. These are the two strains that critics have generally character- ized as profoundly contradictory or finally incommensurable; and most work on Weil examines one at the exclusion of the other. I am arguing that Weil's metaphysics of work creates a ground for her engagement of both Catholicism and Marxism (again: in Weil's version) without, on the one hand, eliding the contradiction and incommensurability such ajuxta- position produces. The tranquil indifference that Georges Bataille saw in her is echoed at the conceptual level, in that Weil calmly engages fre-

quently opposing discourses on her way to a given analysis. Dubbed the Red Virgin by some who knew her and named Lazare by Bataille in his

powerful novel Blue of Noon, her remarks were destined to scandalize.26 She is particularly scandaleuse for orthodox Marxism, where she is

dismissable first and foremost because she is a convert to Christianity. Such remarks as the following were not destined for happy reception among the Marxists: "Man," she writes, "is born a slave and . .. servitude is his natural condition."27 When Marx made his famous statement de-

nouncing the separation between manual and intellectual labor, says Weil, "he did not know" that something transcends them both. This something, of course, is the other realm, or noumena for Weil, which she calls the

supernatural. Without this "something," everything else is meaningless.28 Political activism itself is for the protection of the soul. This is a largely Neoplatonic position that offered her the synthetic approach she loved, but it is also Kantian in part. One of the many curious concatenations in Weil's writing lies here. Weil holds with Plato that there is a parallel realm to that of phenomena, a transcendental to which we aspire and which lies somewhere in memory. At the same time, however, she also uses Kant's

meaning of transcendental: the way in which we talk about that which is not

26. See Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Mathews (New York, 1986); hereafter abbreviated BN. Bataille's description of Lazare is a mixture of awe and disgust, af- fection and near hatred. Noting that she was "ugly and conspicuously filthy," he adds that Lazare "cast a spell as much by her lucidity as by her visionary powers of thought." But he is not sure she is sane and says that what fascinates him the most about her is "the unhealthy eagerness that prompted her to give her life and blood for the cause of the downtrodden" (BN, pp. 29, 30, 31).

27. Weil, "Analysis of Oppression," trans. Wills and Petrie, Simone Weil: An Anthology, p. 157.

28. Weil, "Prerequisite for the Dignity of Labour," trans. Miles, Simon Weil: An Anthol- ogy, p. 254; hereafter abbreviated "PDL." See also Weil, "Is There a Marxist Doctrine?"

Oppression and Liberty, pp. 169-95. Marx had an idea of genius, which Weil formulates as looking at the relationships of force in society. But then, according to Weil, he had an "acci- dent very common in the nineteenth century; he began to take himself too seriously" and thus suffered from "a sort of messianic illusion which made him believe that he had been chosen to play a decisive role for the salvation of mankind." Thereafter, "it was impossible for him ... to think in the full sense of the word." This is not the first time that Weil uses

religious vocabulary to describe Marx, while accusing him simultaneously of ignoring the

"something else" which is, precisely, "the supernatural" (pp. 169-70, 175).


given us to know. These two positions cannot be held simultaneously; but Weil does so, creating a kind of vertigo in the experience of reading her. She reads Plato throughKant and uses both notions of transcendental without "revisionary" elucidation. So, too, she does not engage in revisionary Marxism. When she thinks he is wrong, she says so brutally; there is neither time nor need, in her work, for revisionism. The same holds for her views on the role of the Church from her particular Catholic perspective. She would not be baptized; she never joined the Communist party.

As if these views were not enough to appall any Marxist, Weil rejects, it will be remembered, Marx's idea of revolution. Revolution is the true

opiate of the people, she says, in "Prerequisite for the Dignity of Labour." In a brilliant (and, I would add, prescient) Hegelian move, Weil writes that revolution will change nothing but the claim to power. The hegemony and its hierarchy will remain: "Most revolutionary feeling, though initially a revolt against injustice, often becomes very rapidly as it has done in the past, a worker's imperialism exactly analogous to national

imperialism" ("PDL," p. 246). As a revolt against the injustices of society, revolution is "right and proper." But no revolution will get rid of "the essential misery of the working condition." It is revolution itself, she re-

peats, which is the opiate of the people ("PDL," pp. 246-47). In this passage, which Gorz will echo (without attribution) some fifty years later, Weil goes on to note that when the acquisition of money is the object of desire, within a system that prevents the worker from becoming enriched ("a worker who becomes rich ceases to be a worker"), the worker will

simply desire "to escape . .. from the working condition" ("PDL," p. 247). Nothing has changed, in other words. It is in this sense that there can never be progress for humankind, as Marx understands it. Unfooled by the differing valences between Marx and Hegel, Weil will reject as well

any progress toward Spirit as promised in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Marx's division of manual and intellectual labor is overcome by atten-

tion. The worker must be given the power of handling language and, in

particular, written language (hence, Weil's constant commitment to teach-

ing literature and philosophy, as well as composition, to the worker). The worker should take possession of culture. This is revolution. The conclu- sion: "workers need poetry more than bread" ("MW," p. 235). In Marx, she writes, there is no beauty. In short, joy through suffering is man's vocation, and the worker "is better placed than all others to accomplish it in the truest way" ("PDL," p. 256). This depressing statement is followed by one no more reassuring: the ideal factory could be transformed into a kind of church, allowing the contemplation of great art and the time for attention while the work of the hands continues. Small wonder then that she has been called (by David McLellan, for example) a utopian pessimist.29 These religious views, combined with the severe critique of

29. See David McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (London, 1989).


Marx, have led many to overlook the radical stances and proposals Weil assumed to improve working conditions. Moreover, these stances and

proposals can be found in Rabinbach and Gorz (Arendt is far too Aristote- lian) where, because they are stripped of any religious tenor, they are received as both significant and original. Her religious intensity and matter-of-factness make Weil insupportable (in the French sense) for the present era and for any Marxian reading. The taboo against religion in this context, the embarrassment of it, creates a turning away much like, as Weil notes, our aversion to the face of misery.

On theological issues, Weil gets into trouble as well. Her unmitigated hatred of the Hebrew Scriptures (how can a sacred text condone the cru-

elty of God?) has, needless to say, elicited much criticism from scholars of

Judaism. The most respectful and willfully logical critique of her writings on the Jewish religion comes, I think, from L6vinas. He lists the problems: Weil hates the Hebrew Bible; goodness is always a stranger to Juda- ism and evil is specifically Jewish; she is inconsistent (his word is ambigui) in her use of the Bible: at times she uses it as historical documentation, at others, as false witnessings to be rejected out of hand. Only Greek, Chaldean, Egyptian, and Hindu sacred texts are acceptable outside the Christian ones. The universality of God is everywhere present as a pre- figuration of the Passion except in Judaism. L6vinas makes clear from the beginning of his essay that he will respond to her with logic, with the

language of philosophy. He begins with Weil's declaration that "the proof that the contents of Christianity existed before Christ is that there has not been, since that time, any considerable change in the behavior of men."30 We can, he notes cautiously, reverse this argument. In other words, because the behavior of men is static, the mentality that eventually produced Christianity has always been present. Moreover, God can be

forgiving only if he first posits cruelty. And, in a passage that demon- strates a great understanding and admiration for Weil's thought, L6vinas notes that what haunts Weil is a platonic clarity. She saw in the Gospels "the same interiorization of religious truth that the Greeks achieved with

geometry in the register of theoretical knowledge." Life, concludes L6vi- nas, is not a passion. "It is act. It is in history."31

Of course, there are far less generous, if rigorous, responses to Weil's ideas on Judaism.32 But it should be noted that Weil also rejects the

30. Emmanuel L&vinas, "Simone Weil contre la Bible," Difficile liberte: Essais sur leju- dai•me (Paris, 1963), p. 165.

31. Ibid., p. 170. The most hostile essays on Judaism (for example, "Israel") are to be found in the French edition of Gravity and Grace, La Pesanteur et la grdce (Paris, 1947). These are notebooks Weil left with her friend Gustave Thibon, a priest, when she went to the States with her family in 1942.

32. See Nevin, "A Stranger unto Her People: Weil on Judaism," Simone Weil, pp. 235- 59. Nevin's chapter includes a discussion of various responses to Weil by Jewish thinkers.


Church and this for political as much as religious reasons. In her "Last

Thoughts," written in England shortly before she died, Weil argues that the Church has no "right to limit the operations of the mind or the illumi- nations of love in the realm of thought." Its mission is to be guardian of sacred texts and to formulate decisions on "essential points," but only for the "information of the faithful" (quoted in SW, p. 317). The political point is clear: "I do not grant her [the Church] the right to impose her comments on the mysteries of faith as being the truth. Even less do I

grant her the right to use threats and force, by exercising the power of

depriving the faithful of the sacraments, to impose that truth." The doctrine of anathema sit will forever prevent Weil from being baptized. All those anathema sit "are a part of history and have no present validity" (quoted in SW, p. 319).

It is curious that, more recently, Derrida has argued something quite similar. In The Gift of Death, Derrida writes that Christianity is already in interhuman relations, "outside" the history of Christianity itself. Al-

though he agrees with L6vinas that religion is grounded in individual

responsibility, he sees "religiosity" as does Weil: already in human relations, in openness to mystery, and in social structures. The history of

European Christianity is a history of those interrelations as they have influenced the Church, which a posteriori interprets these relations in order to fashion its own hegemony and power.33

But philosophy, like religion and Marxism, has its own problems with Weil. "May religion and philosophy," writes Baudelaire, "come one day as if compelled by the cry of one who despairs."34 They do so in Weil, and therein perhaps lies the trouble for both. We do not need Marx to remind us of the prevalent notion that, as Derrida puts it citing Jan Pato'ka, "politics excludes the mystical." Indeed, PatoEka argues that the mystery of the sacred has as its effect, in Derrida's words, "the abdication of re-

sponsibility." Every revolution, aesthetic or religious, leads to a return of the sacred "in the form of an enthusiasm or fervor ... that corresponds to an abdication of responsibility."35 Weil is the only writer I can think of, in what Derrida calls the Tradition (that is, Western metaphysics), for whom the mystery of the sacred is inextricable, not only from the idea of

responsibility (as in L6vinas), but from political activism. "Action is the affirmation of God," she writes.36

Nevin himself concludes that "for any reader of Weil her relationship to Christianity and its church should be considered secondary to her relationship with her own people" (p. 236).

33. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago, 1995). See

chapter I in particular, "Secrets of European Responsibility," pp. 1-34. 34. Charles Baudelaire, "L'Ecole pagan," Oeuvres complBtes (Paris, 1968), p. 626. 35. Derrida, The Gift of Death, pp. 34, 21. 36. "Mais Faction est affirmation de Dieu" (Weil, "'Le Beau et le bien,"' Premiers ecrits

philosophique, p. 73).


The vehicle for articulating this elision, this necessary syllogism, is

philosophy. In other words, Weil's writings are unnerving because they rigorously refuse to see the difference-in valence, disciplinary bound- aries, even style, and certainly teleology-between philosophy, religion, and political activism. Weil purposefully does not acknowledge the great upheaval that Derrida (still reading Pato'ka) examines: the transition from the Platonic to the Christian worldview. These two systems that (in Derrida's terms) are marked by an economy of incorporation (of the orgi- astic mysteries) in the case of Platonism and by an economy of repression (of the same) in Christianity do not, for Weil, appear as a breach in West- ern thought. She moves between them with astonishing fluidity.

In her own life, she alternated between endless readings and writings to organizing strikes and rebellions in the streets. So, too, her prose style (the limpidity of which, especially in L'Enracinement [The Need for Roots] remains unsurpassed in French), like her speaking voice we are told by those who knew her, is possessed of a matter-of-factness and aphoristic sparseness which moves unhesitatingly among those three realms.

This elision between registers is disconcerting because it refuses to

recognize itself as such. It is a kind of brilliant but exasperating parataxis. A discussion of the contemplation of God, for example, is followed by a detailed account of how to improve machines in a factory and then by a series of "proofs" that rest on the fact that neither Plato nor Aristotle had

any notion of work: "The Greeks knew about art and sport, but not about work" ("MW," p. 232). But as Eric Auerbach points out, parataxis can become a weapon of eloquence.

These transitions, which deny a change of discourse formation and which consciously deny as well the inappropriate, are to be found too in her life. (I speak again here of her life only because the political activity is for her to be seen as a natural extension of her thought, and vice versa.) So, as Bataille puts it, in Barcelona she was "alien French," and among the workers she was "alien intellectual" (BN, 122).

Rigorous inappropriateness imposed as something natural was her

ontology, at every level. She was, after all, of Jewish origin and Catholic faith; she was a Catholic who refused baptism and scolded the church; a Communist troublemaker from bourgeois parents who refused to join the

Party; an intellectual who hung out with the working class and changed her grammar and intonation accordingly; and a woman who went to ex- tremes to be unattractive (her clothes were soiled, her hair wild and un- kempt, she rarely bathed, she considered it to be a great misfortune to be a woman). Bataille, in one of his least charitable moments in a litany of generally uncharitable descriptions, writes that around her he felt the

weight on his wrist of"a garbage-eating bird of ill-omen" (BN, p. 36). She was also a teacher whose philosophy courses were willfully scandalous (the family, she told her young girl students, is merely legalized prostitu-


tion) and a factory worker whose inept hands and crushing migraines got her consistently fired. Choosing contexts in which she was clearly out of

place, she combined an insistence upon marginalization with the equal insistence that such is the lot of "man," that inappropriateness, therefore, is a way of living the truth of existence.

Existence itself, she wrote to her friend Albertine Th&venon, consists in "conceiving one's entire life before oneself and directing it all in a sense determined by the will and with one's labor." It is here that I would suggest that we consider the hand. Weil disassociates the will, it should be remembered, from attention, and the metaphor she uses to do so is the hand: "We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will," she writes. She continues:

The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them. To beg for them is to believe that we have a father in heaven.37

Let me first note that this passage is a prime example of what I mean by Weil's abrupt transition of registers, or parataxis; an abruptness that the matter-of-factness in the tone refuses to recognize. The syllogism is shock-

ing, as is the author's lack of acknowledgement of this shock. It is like Kafka's technique: once you accept that Gregor Samsa is a cockroach, everything else follows logically. In Weil's writings, the reader is fre-

quently confronted with cockroaches, while the writer presses on, deaf to our cries of protest.

In any case, it is significant that Weil uses the act of the hand as a demonstration of will because her hands always gave her difficulty (they were notoriously awkward and apparently very small), and her will was in fact powerless to control what she scornfully refers to as "a few movements of a few muscles." The hand, which has its own philosophical tradition, some of which I will mention here, is the site of struggle for Weil. She could not make her hands useful or rapid-neither in factory work nor in writing.38 I would suggest that the hand is a problem for Weil, that

37. Weil, "Attention and Will," Gravity and Grace, p. 169. 38. To Thevenon she writes of a nice worker who helps her when she is in despair

over work she cannot do well. In the same letter, she speaks of how fatigue and pain make her lose control over her muscles. See Weil, CO, pp. 22 and 26. Weil's terrible migraines, combined with her ill health and general awkwardness, made manual labor both dangerous and exremely difficult for her. As she puts it in a letter to a student, it is particularly difficult to get factory work without a certificate when one is "like me, slow, awkward, and not very strong" (CO, p. 31).


she obsesses about it, precisely because it is the organ, as Hegel puts it, that stands as a transparency between being-in-the-world and spirit. For Weil, the hand is supposed to be the very organ of elision her writings require; in other words, the hand mimes the move in Weil from thought to action. And if her bumpless shifts between registers are to be mani- fested and indeed realized, it should be by the hand. But Weil's hands refused her the easy transitions that her thought assumed. The hand, for Weil, is a metaxu-both an obstacle and a way to truth.39 But here the obstacle is unwanted and becomes a source of great embarrassment and

finally despair. It is only if we understand the shifting registers, the cockroaches, in Weil's writings as a fundamental and vital given that we can see why hands, and the issue of the hand, should be such a source of

misery for her. Her hands became the obstacle that consistently thwarted her theories. She spoke constantly of her lack of dexterity ("maladresse naturelle") and urged her students to train their hands and bodies as she had not. "I cannot emphasize enough," she writes to her student, how

important it is to exercise your muscles, your hands, your eyes. Without such exercise, one feels singularly incomplete" (CO, p. 37). No wonder she felt an affinity for Mallarm6 who, himself unconcerned with the hand

(except for the "Sonnet in X"), nevertheless saw writing as a death, as an erasure of the subject, as a confrontation with the white page that provides infinite obstacles. The awkwardness of her hands constantly made her stumble, fail, miss (she was always, as I have noted, being fired from her factory jobs because of them). They broke the rhythm she saw in the factories, rhythms that, she wrote, echoed that of the universe. She could

keep the beat neither in her writing (which she believed, with Alain, should be beautifully penned in a manner that eluded her) nor in her manual tasks. The hand, then, remains the place in Weil where the smoothness of thought is interrupted, where the erasure of the I fails because it constantly draws attention to itself. It is perhaps the place where, because the elision itself stumbles, her thought is put into question for her.

It is worth considering, in this context, a few major texts on the hand. Such a consideration will necessarily be brief, but I hope that it will help to develop what is at stake for Weil. For if we agree with my earlier asser- tion that it is work that sublates and unifies what I am calling the three registers of Weil's thought, then we can view the hand as the site of work, both of the mind and body, and of its actualization. Work is rendered visible, realized, through the hand.

Certainly this is how Hegel saw it. I have written elsewhere on Heg-

39. See her essay "Metaxu," Gravity and Grace, pp. 132-34. We read there, for example, "this world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through" (p. 132).


el's notion of the hand, but some of this ground needs to be revisited to frame the problem.40 In the chapter on "Reason" of the Phenomenology of the Spirit, there is a discussion of possible laws for the relation of "self- consciousness to actuality." Individuality is here "the object for observa- tion." The outer of the individual acts "only as an organ in making the inner visible or, in general, a being-for-another; for the inner, in so far as it is in the organ, is the activity itself."41 Hegel will align speech with the hand and thus with work; like the speaking mouth, the working hand externalizes the inner being, from which it is then separated.

The hand, then, cannot provide the antithesis between inner and outer because it is itself an antithesis. Nevertheless, the hand is granted the privilege of "transparency" between inner and outer even if a separation between the two will come of the hand's work. Like speech, the hand is elusive in character because it is, finally, both inner and outer and yet (as always with Hegel), neither. In a passage on palmistry, Hegel notes,

That the hand, however, must represent the in-itself of the individuality in respect of its fate is easy to see from the fact that, next to the organ of speech, it is the hand most of all by which a man manifests and actualizes himself. It is the living artificer of his fortune. We may say of the hand that it is what a man does, for in it, as the active organ of his self-fulfillment, he is present as the animating soul; and since he is primarily his own fate, the hand will thus express this in-itself.42

Like speech, the hand is both being and doing, the "living artificer" of man's fortune. It is the organ, in other words, where thought and action are, precisely as Weil would have it, elided; it is the manifestation of work both as that which yields product, through action, and that which reaches conclusions, through thought. The hand, like work, is linked with fate.

Engels, in a curious document (written in 1876 and published twenty years later) entitled The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, begins in the same vein: "Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour."43 Here, despite the pervasive Darwin- ism, the influence of Hegel is evident. Engels goes on to claim that it is the hand, "with labour," which widened "man's horizon" and allowed for

speech. "First labour" [into which the hand has been elided]," he writes,

40. See Frangoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits ofMimesis in Literature

(Chicago, 1987), pp. 162-76. 41. G. W. E Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977),

pp. 185, 187. 42. Ibid., p. 189; my emphasis. 43. Frederick Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, trans.

pub. (Peking, 1975), p. 6.


"after it and then with it speech-these are the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man." The connection of the hand with speech is not to be over- looked. The characteristic difference between "apes and human society" for Engels is one word: labor. Labor allows for man's evolution, thus lead-

ing to speech. "No simian hand," writes Engels, "ever fashioned even the crudest of stone knives."44 We have moved into political theory, but the hand remains the organ that transcends the inner/outer dialectic; indeed, for Engels "man" is the product and the organ of the hand. The Engels text, not insignificantly for Weil, was to have been the introduction for a work originally entitled "The Three Basic Forms of Slavery."

In Plato's Laws, there is a discussion that concludes that we should all be ambidextrous, as we are with our feet. It is unnatural (and the fault of mothers) to favor one hand over the other: "Unnatural are the devices

by which it is contrived to make a man's left weaker than his right." The Athenian who makes this statement wants a race that will be "ambicrural and ambidextrous." Plato's concern with the hands, then, is that they serve the notion of symmetry and wholeness, that they help achieve a perfect synthesis, or balance, which are seen as "natural." Difference between the hands is to be eradicated and thus with it a "universal mis-

understanding" that "there is a real and natural difference in the serviceability of either hand for various actions."45

It should be clear by now that the hand in Hegel, Engels, and Plato, for example, serves as a metaphor for the larger metaphysical agenda of each text. The hand is always tied to thought and to techne and therefore

always engaging the dialectic of inner being and outward manifestation, including production. Such a dialectic is in turn, of course, fundamental to any philosophy (political or not). In the case of Hegel and Engels, the hand is directly tied to speech. And these two attributes, the human hand and speech, make for the essence (a word still permissible in those texts) of what is "man."

The hand itself, however, for reasons already stated, eludes essence. Even in Descartes the hand has this strange status. It is at once a part of the body and a thing apart, almost autonomous. In similar terms, Hei- degger too engages the hand. "The hand is a peculiar thing," he writes. He adds:

In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand's essence can never be determined, or explained, by its be-

44. Ibid., pp. 6, 3. 45. Plato, The Laws, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Lane Cooper et al., ed.

Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 7.795a, 7.795d, 7.794d, pp. 1367, 1366.


ing an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands.46

Resonating with Engels, Heidegger notes that the hand is to be differenti- ated from all paws, claws, or fangs by "an abyss of essence." The hand is with speech what permits thought; "only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands" (W, p. 16). Or, as Derrida puts it, when he reads this passage, "The hand thinks before being thought; it is thought, a

thought, thinking."'4 The hand occupies, concludes Heidegger, man's essence. The hand "designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign." And in a textual moment that achieves the unity of which Plato's Athenian dreams, Heidegger writes that "two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness" (W p. 16).

Thus when Alain holds that thinking is labor, a view that, as we have noted, Weil shares, he is writing out of a long tradition of philosophical discourse about the hand-the hand as elided into labor and as a manifestation of thought and speech. Heidegger's essay on thinking, of course, came out ten years after Weil's death. Nevertheless, in all of these texts, the hand is a play of showing (monstrousness, to use Heidegger's term), of revealing and at the same time of hiding a truth of being. Whether it is writing or engaged in work, the hand is implicated in the hypostatiza- tion of thinking as work and writing as the preservation of thought (logo- centric concerns notwithstanding).

The combination of speech and the hand as revealing thought, and at the same time veiling the common source of both, emerges as well in the story of Isaac from Genesis. Jacob, it will be remembered, disguises his hands with animal skin in order to pose as his brother Esau and thus receive the blind Isaac's paternal blessing. "The voice is Jacob's voice," says the dying Isaac, "but the hands are the hands of Esau" (Gen. 27:22). The case of Weil turns this figural tale around: the voice never betrays her; the hands frequently do.

Simone Weil is, if anything, postmodern before the fact, an anachro- nism in her late modernist age. These labels, of which I am generally quite suspicious, may be of use here if only to articulate her disjunctions. She is postmodern, then, in her insistence on the dismantling of the sub-

ject; in her incorporation of technology and industry, quiltlike, into the

complexities of abstract thought; in her insistence on an epistemology grounded in physics and mathematics; in her smooth and yet fierce juxta- position of varied quotations from often antithetical sources (like the

46. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York, 1968), p. 16; hereafter abbreviated W

47. Derrida, "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Deconstruc- tion and Philosophy: The Texts ofJacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago, 1987), p. 171.


postmodern architect who alludes and incorporates, without apology, from different traditions); and in her critique of late capitalism. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, she is postmodern in her notion of diraci- nement: the idea that uprootedness is a sign of the times (later echoed by Deleuze, Guattari, Geertz, Lloyd, and others) but with the added warning that such homelessness destroys the human soul. Her textual hands are as graceful as she would have had them be in the factories: she reaches

easily for Marx, Plato, Kant, Hegel, and religious documents of all sorts to argue that the work of the hand, and the labor of thought, together make for a human dignity. A dignity, and the conditions necessary for

achieving it, of which Max Weber, or even Marx, could only have a glim- mering.

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