Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-exiled Jew - Softcover

Nevin, Thomas R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807819999 ISBN 13: 9780807819999

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012

Synopsis

Over fifty years after her death, Simone Weil (1909-1943) remains one of the most searching religious inquirers and political thinkers of the twentieth century. Albert Camus said she had a “madness for truth.” She rejected her Jewishness and developed a strong interest in Catholicism, although she never joined the Catholic church. Both an activist and a scholar, she constantly spoke out against injustice and aligned herself with workers, with the colonial poor in France, and with the opressed everywhere. She came to believe that suffering itself could be a way to unity with God, and her death at thirty-four has been recorded as suicide by starvation.

This extraordinary study is primarily a topography of Weil’s mind, but Thomas Nevin is persuaded that her thought is inextricably bound to her life and dramatic times. Thus, he not only addresses her thoughts and her prejudices but examines her reasons for entertaining them and gives them a historical focus. He claims that to Weil’s generation the Spanish War, the Popular Front, the ascendance of Hitlerism, and the Vichy years were not mere backdrops but definitive events.

Nevin explores in detail not only matters of continuing interest, such as Weil’s leftist politics and her attempt to embrace Christianity, but also hitherto unexamined aspects of her life and work which permit a deeper understanding of her: her writings on science, her work as a poet and dramatist, and her selective friendships. The thread uniting these topics is her struggle to maintain her independence as a free thinker while resisting community such as Judaism could have offered her. Her intellectual struggles eloquently reveal the desperate isolation of Jews torn between the lure of assimilation and the tormented dignity of their communal history.

Nevin’s massive research draws on the full range of essays, notebooks, and fragments from the Simone Weil archives in Paris, many of which have never been translated or published.

Originally published in 1991.

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About this title

About the Author

Thomas R. Nevin is author of Irving Babbitt: An Intellectual Study.

Reviews

French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) was born to an Alsatian father and a Russian mother, both Jewish. After an intense conversion experience in 1938, she rejected her Jewishness and embraced her own version of Roman Catholicism, though she never joined the Church. To Nevin ( Irving Babbitt ), emulating Weil as a saint or a religious guide would be a "disastrous" mistake. He interprets her aid to Spanish anarchists, to the unemployed and the oppressed as expressions of her role as a tzeddik , the traditional Jewish "just person." In Weil's passionate wrestling with God and her quest for a special convenant with Him, she also manifests her Jewishness, argues Nevin. This thoughtful, scholarly study draws on Weil's unpublished archival writings, some translated here for the first time.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nevin (classical languages, John Carroll Univ.) gives us a rich, thorough, and welcome study of the intellectual, cultural, and religious histories that informed Weil's writing and thought. While Weil (1909-43) has been the subject of several recent biographies (and some hagiographical studies), this critique attends to details often omitted or glossed over: the teachings of Alain, her early teacher and lifelong intellectual influence; her poetry and its aesthetic roots; and her battles with Judaism in a world undergoing the crucible of Nazism. With its extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, this volume belongs in both academic and public libraries as it enhances Weil's own writings and other works about her.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807819999
• ISBN 13: 9780807819999
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 504