Simone Weil - Softcover

Nevin, Thomas R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807865745 ISBN 13: 9780807865743

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

Book Description

"Aims to explore and, so far as is possible, validate Weil's obsessions and work by using the fulcrum of Jewish self-hatred. . . . There is not only learning and the poise of doubt in the book; there is courage and a salutary sadness."--George Steiner, New Yorker

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0807865745
• ISBN 13: 9780807865743
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 506