Summer 2001
Volume 27, Number 4

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."1 But even for the rest of humankind, Weil counters Hume's ideal life of contemplation with attention, a far more rigorous and intense form of meditation. "Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man."2 Moreover, attention is not to be confused 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:

See Also E.P. Thompson: "Christopher Caudwell" (Winter 1995) Simon Shaffer: Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System (Autumn 1994) Carlo Rotella: Good with Her Hands: Women, Boxing, and Work (Summer 1996)

"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

1. See Simone Weil, "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations," trans. Richard Rees, Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York, 1986), pp. 201-10.

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

3. Ibid., pp. 171-72.

4. Quoted in Simone Pétrement, La Vie de Simone Weil, 2 vols. (Paris, 1973), 1:146

5. See Weil, "Sur la pensée et le travail," Premiers écrits philosophique, ed. Gilbert Kahn and Rolf Kühn, vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes, ed. D'André 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 direction I attempt to go in this essay. See, for example, Eugène Fleur, "Le 'Social' dans La Condition ouvrière," in Cahiers Simone Weil 7 (Dec. 1984): 341-46; René Prévost, "La Philosophie du travail chez Charles Péguy et chez Simone Weil," Cahiers Simone Weil 7 (Dec. 1984): 350-59; Robert Chenavier, "Civilisation du travail ou civilisation du temps libre? Actualité de la pensée de Simone Weil," Cahiers Simone Weil 10 (Sept.ĞDec. 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).

Françoise 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 Property (1994) and editor of The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis (1988), she has just completed For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001).