Winter 2003
Volume 29, Number 2

Elsewhere, however, concentration (which specifies the degree of attention) is that state in which objects are relinquished. In "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies," to which I shall return, Weil writes: "Attention consists of suspending our thought...Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it" (WG, pp. 111-12). Thought, as we ordinarily understand it, is not quite the word Weil means, for thought implies the very focus that is intentionally suspended in this description of attention. At issue is the distinction between fastening the attention around a single phenomenon and leaving the attention open, a difference immediately understood by Weil in terms of larger freedoms and constraints: "If one desires a particular thing one becomes enslaved to the series of conditions. But if one desires the series itself, the satisfaction of this desire is unconditioned" (FL, p. 143).

See Also Françoise Meltzer: The Hands of Simone Weil (Summer 2001)

These two forms of attention, focused on an object and released from all objects ("empty, waiting, not seeking anything"), as well as the specific practices Weil associates with attention, indicate the range and subtlety of a topic to which Weil continually returned. In the following pages I shall examine this phenomenon of attention--in her spiritual autobiography Weil identified its discovery with the overcoming of a despair so severe that it led her to contemplate suicide⁴ in order to inquire how it became a discipline for forfeiting personality and consequently came to be associated with the affliction and violence requisite for such a renunciation. I am interested in examining how an ostensibly neutral phenomenon like attention could require violence, and I am especially interested in considering a person's relation to such a requirement. I am also concerned with how we might understand someone who attempted to separate personality from being--that is, with how we might value someone who herself valued impersonality at such tremendous cost. My own understanding arises from the consideration of Weil's assertions outside the pathology of self-hatred or cruelty. My essay will examine the frictive relations within Weil's writing on self-annihilation--she called it "decreation" (N, 1:279)--as well as the relation between Weil's didactic imperatives for the achievement of that state and her representation of a person who lived such a reduced life. The resistance between these positions is what makes Weil's writing interesting; resistance registers her uncompromising understanding of the difficulty of her own project. Weil's contemplations on impersonality indicate a depth perception about a matter so alien to us that we barely have concepts for it, so quick are we to find any attempt to eradicate egotism in terms this extreme repellant. Yet unlike writers who treat impersonality as desirable but impossible (Jonathan Edwards, for instance) or desirable and inevitable, something without cost or consequences (Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance), Weil represents a middle ground, one could almost say a normative case, in which impersonality is seen as desirable and possible. Her work describes the cultivation of a practice for its attainment.

Throughout these pages I shall be suggesting that although the point of losing all personal being might be to produce a void that could receive supernatural grace ("produce" being a word that would be flawed for Weil because of its sense of agency), the cultivation of attention is a naturalistic process. For "while virtue is a supernatural thing," attention, for Weil, is a natural one; she crucially describes attention as "possibly without an analogue among natural phenomena" (N, 1:96). In fact, "a rational creature is one that contains within itself the germ, the principle, the vocation of decreation." In Weil's cosmology, attention makes the void or decreates the I so that there is a forfeiture of personality, in the absence of which "supernatural grace [might] descend." Yet if "the void serves for nothing except grace," it is not itself dependent on grace (FL, p. 159). In other words, there are "two annihilations, annihilation in nothingness and annihilation in God" (N, 2:463). For Weil, the first precedes the second, as a training or a practice.⁵ In addition, although God is central to Weil's practice of attention (as its object or its point) doctrine doesn't matter to her. My understanding would be consonant with Weil's own distinction that, for instance, "the Gospel contains a conception of human life, not a theology" (FL, p. 147). That understanding would be consonant in turn with her explicit repudiation of Christian dogma as at once antagonistic to individual spiritual practice and bound to exclusions that render any incarnation of Christianity impossible: "I remain beside all those things that cannot enter the Church... on account of...two little words," namely, "anathema sit" (WG, p. 77). She elaborated: "in my eyes Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love...so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in existence. All the immense stretches of past centuries, except the last twenty are among them; all the countries inhabited by colored races; all secular life in the white peoples' countries...all the traditions banned as heretical, those of the Manicheans and Albigenses for instance; all those things resulting from the Renaissance, too often degraded but not quite without value" (WG, p. 75).⁶ In the following pages, I shall argue that it is necessary to locate Weil's practice of impersonality with reference to procedures of disidentification or with reference to what she elsewhere called "a philosophy of Perception, of a practical and experimental nature" (N, 1:313). My examples range across Weil's essays, notebook writings, and The Need for Roots; however heterogeneous the contexts, these examples raise the question of what kind of interest is generated by the destruction of a personality--a destruction so captivating that it seems to occur on the reader's behalf yet is ultimately useless for the reader,⁷ a topic touched on in the essay's last pages.

4. "At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. . . . After months of inward darkness, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment" (WG, p. 64).

5. Although on occasion Weil reverses her understanding of attention as a natural phenomenon (for instance, "Supernatural love and prayer are nothing else but the highest form of attention" [N, 1:311]), such an appropriation of attention to the apparatus of the supernatural is uncharacteristic.

6. Leslie Fiedler's introduction to Waiting for God provides a helpful characterization of the terms in which Weil's "outsideness was the very essence of her spiritual position" (WG, p. 7). She was born into a Jewish family in 1909, but her values growing up, in Fiedler's words, "were simply 'French,' that is to say, a combination of Greek and secularized Christian elements" (WG, p. 13). For a detailed account of how Weil's complex religious understanding mutated throughout her life, see Simone Pêtrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1976), hereafter abbreviated SW, specifically, for example, "London (1942-43)," in which Pêtrement discusses Weil's religious writings in the last year of her life. In one of these papers discussing the basis of human obligation, Weil does not name God because "to gather people behind Christian aspirations...It is necessary to try to define them in terms that an atheist might adhere to completely," in terms "acceptable to Catholics, Protestants, and atheists" (quoted in SW, p. 493). See also Peter Winch's discussion of Weil's "supernatural" in terms of situations that generate "wonder" for which no explanations can suffice (Peter Winch, Simone Weil: "The Just Balance" [Cambridge, 1989], pp. 207, 208). Winch's interesting account of Weil attempts to naturalize supernatural language, by aligning it with philosophical language in general and Wittgenstein's language in particular. In this way Winch] marks his understanding of the erosion of the line between philosophy and religion in Weil's writing.

7. The problem is not that we are voyeuristically attending to private journals that we have no right to see; Weil extends us that right when she takes pains to ensure the writings' availability. Weil entrusted her notebooks and essays indirectly to Father Perrin: "Who knows," she wrote to him on 26 May 1942, if the thoughts "I bear in me are not sent, partly at any rate, so that you should make some use of them" (WG, p. 101). It is reasonable to suppose that when Weil instructed Father Perrin to make use of thoughts to which she was "prejudicial" (WG, p. 100), she meant him to make them available for publication, which he did.