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  What others have written about Simone Weil and her work
   
Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus in a letter to Weil's mother in 1951

Simone Weil, je le sais encore maintenant, est le seul grand esprit de notre temps et je souhaite que ceux qui le reconnaissent en reçoivent assez de modestie pour ne pas essayer d’annexer ce témoignage bouleversant.

Pour moi, je serais comblé si l’on pouvait dire qu’à ma place, et avec les faibles moyens don’t je dispose, j’ai servi à faire connaitre et à répandre son oeuvre dont on n’a pas encore mesuré tout le retentissement.

Simone Weil, I still know this now, is the only great mind of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing.

For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure.

 
Poet T. S. Eliot
A woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints
 
Malcolm Muggeridge
In my opinion, the most luminous intelligence of the twentieth century
 
Her elder brother André Weil the famous mathematician in a 1932 letter (1241)
Ca va faire, je pense, 23 ans que tu as fait ton entrée dans le monde phénoménal pour le plus grand emmerdement des recteurs et des directrices It will now be I think 23 years that you made your entry into the phenomenal world to create the greatest pain in the ass for rectors and school directors
 
Director of Career Placement, Ecole Normale Supérieure
We shall send the Red Virgin as far away as possible so that we shall never hear of her again
 

Bolchevik Leon Trotsky in a letter of July 30, 1936, to his comrade Victor Serge

I knew her very well, I have had long discussions with her. For a period of time she was more or less in sympathy with our cause, but then she lost faith in the proletariat and in Marxism. It's possible that she will turn toward the left again. But is it worth the trouble to talk about this any longer?
 
The Police Commissioner of Le Puy to the Prefect in a 1932 report to the Prefect
Il y aurait lieu dans l'intérêt de la sécurité publique que cette personne soit éloignée du Puy, où elle ne cesse de prêcher la révolte. In the interest of public security it would be advisable that this person be distanced from Le Puy, where she has never ceased to preach revolt.
 
Michel Collinet (1255)
Simone Weil souffrait de migraines continuelles. Au milieu d'une conversation où elle parlait avec volubilité, elle s'arrêtait soudainement, faisant effort pour surmonter la douleur. Simone Weil suffered from continual migraines. In the middle of a conversation in which she was talking with volubility, she would suddenly stop, making an effort to surmount the pain.
 
Writer Georges Bataille (1252) who caricatured Weil in his novel Le Bleu du Ciel
Bien peu d'êtres humains m'ont intéressé au même point. Son incontestable laideur effrayait, mais personnellement je prétendais qu'elle avait aussi, en un sens, une véritable beauté... Elle séduisait par une autorité très douce, et très simple; c'était un être admirable, asexué, avec quelque chose de néfaste. Very few human beings have interested me as much. Her undeniable ugliness scared people, but personally I claim that she also had, in a sense, a true beauty... She seduced with a very sweet and very simple authority; she was an admirable, asexual being with a noxious quality.
Toujours noire, les vêtements noirs, les cheveux en aile de corbeaux, le teint bistre. Elle était sans doute très bonne, mais à coup sûr un Don Quichotte qui plaisait par sa lucidité, son pessimisme hardi, et par un courage extême que l'impossible attirait. Elle avait bien peu d'humour, pourtant je suis sûr qu'intérieurement elle était plus fêlée, plus vivante, qu'elle ne croyait elle-même... Always black, black clothes, hair like crows' wings, a dark skin. She was doubtless a very good person, but surely a Don Quichote who pleased us with her lucidity, her hardy pessimism, and with an extreme courage attracted by the impossible. She had very little humor, yet I feel sure that deep inside herself she was zanier, more alive than she believed herself to be...

Je le dis sans vouloir la diminuer, il y avait en elle une merveilleuse volonté d'inanité: c'est peut-être le ressort d'une âpreté géniale, qui rend ses livres si prenant

I say it without wanting to diminish her, she had a wonderful will for inanity: that was perhaps the consequence of her harsh genius, which rendered her books so taking
 
Gustave Thibon (1255-56) who masterfully edited Weil's notes to create La Pesanteur et la Grâce - Gravity & Grace
Elle n'était pas laide, comme on l'a dit, mais prématurément voûtée et vieillie par l'ascétisme et la maladie, et seuls ses yeux admirables surnagaient dans ce naufrage de beauté. She was not ugly, as has been said, but prematurely hunched and aged by asceticism and illness, and only her admirable eyes survived the shipwreck of her beauty.
Quel est l'aimable êveque qui voulait ajouter aux litanies des saints cette invocation: Seigneur délivrez-nous des saints vivants? Who is the pleasant bishop who wanted to add to the litany of saints the following invocation: Lord deliver us from living saints?

Elle était passionnée jusque dans son mépris des passions, elle cherchait encore un signe dans son refus de tous les signes. Cet être, qui se voulait flexible à toutes les motions de la volonté divine, ne souffrait pas que le cours des événements ou la bienveillance de ses amis vinssent déplacer d'un pouce les jalons posés par sa volonté d'immolation. Détachée jusqu'aux entrailles de ses goûts et besoins, elle n'était pas détachée de son détachement. Et la façon dont elle montait la garde autour de son vide témoignait encore d'un terrible souci d'elle-même. Dans le grand livre de l'univers posé devant ses regards, son moi était comme un mot qu'elle avait peut-être réussi à effacer, mais qui restait souligné.

She was passionate even about her disdain for passions, she sought for a sign even in her refusal of all signs. This being, who wanted to be flexible to all the movements of divine will, would not allow the course of events or the benevolence of her friends to move by one inch the limits of her self-imposed immolation. Detached to the core from her tastes and needs, she was not detached from her own detachment. And the way she would guard her own emptiness revealed a tremendous self-concern. In the great book of the universe she put before her eyes, her self was a word that she perhaps succeeded in erasing, but it remained underlined.
   
Nicolas Vimar
Par certaines outrances la mystique peut agacer... Son helleno-christianisme qui voit des précurseurs du Christ partout sauf chez les Juifs est peu convaincant. Sa vision d'une Eglise pervertie par Rome, sauvée un temps par le sursaut cathare, révèle un platonisme exclusif. Certain extremisms of the mystic in her can irritate... Her Helleno-christianism that sees a precursor to Christ everywhere except among the Jews is not convincing. Her vision of a Church perverted by Rome, and saved for a time by the Cathare upheaval, reveals an exclusive Platonism.
En revanche, la philosophe de L'Enracinement compte parmi les plus belles pages du socialisme français depuis Proudhon et Sorel. Son refus de l'utilitarisme lui permet de conserver le meilleur de Marx et de renvoyer dos à dos individualisme et collectivisme. Ses Réflexions préfigurent certaines pages de La Société du Spectacle en faisant de la déréalisation la cause première de l'oppression au sein du gros animal social. Cette coupure fondamentale entre l'homme et sa vie est due aux rapports de production mais aussi à un tryptique diabolique : Argent, machinisme, algèbre. Les trois monstres de la civilisation actuelle. Autant d'écrans entre l'homme et la réalité, d'où une crise de civilisation sans précédent: l'aventure de Descartes a mal tourné . Mais ce pessimisme est rempli d'espérance. D'où nous viendra la renaissance, à nous qui avons souillé et vidé tout le globe terrestre ? Du passé seul si nous l'aimons. On the other hand, the philosophy of The Enracinement counts among the most beautiful pages of French Socialism since Proudhon and Sorel. Her refusal of utilitarianism allows her to keep the best of Marx and put individualism and collectivism back to back. Her Reflections prefigure certain pages of The Society of Spectacle (Guy Debord) by making derealization the primary cause of oppression in the heart of the big social animal. This fundamental cut between man and his life is due to the relations of production but also to the diabolical tryptich: Money, Machinism, Algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. As many screens between man and reality, from whence a crisis of civilization without precedent: Descartes' adventure has turned out badly. But this pessimism is filled with hope. Where will the renaissance come from, for we who have soiled and emptied the entire terrestial globe? From the past, only if we love it.
 
Poet Stephanie Strickland who has written The Red Virgin, A Poem for Simone Weil
Weil came to her philosophical and religious ideas by a path that included elite university training, factory work, potato digging, harvest in the vineyards, teaching philosophy to adolescent women, partisanship in trade unions, anarchistic Socialism, pacifism, rejection of pacifism, a conversion experience that did not lead her to joining ... a religion, exile in New York City, and employment by De Gaulle's government-in-exile in London.
Weil used her body as a tool as well as a weapon. She threw herself under the wheels of the same issues women are starving for answers to today: issues of hunger, violence, exclusion, betrayal of the the body, inability to be heard, and self-hate. ...
Weil, our shrewdest political observer since Machiavelli, was never deceived by the glamor of power, and she committed herself to resisting force in whatever guise. More 'prophet' than 'saint,' more 'wise woman' than either, she bore a particular kind of bodily knowledge that the Western tradition cannot absorb. Simone Weil belongs to a world culture, still to be formed, where the voices of multiple classes, castes, races, genders, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions, can be respected. To achieve this culture is an impossible task, but, as Weil would remind us, not on that account to be forsaken.
Today we look to Weil for hope, for meditation, for the bridge a body makes. She knew that the truth had been 'taken captive,' and that we must 'seek at greater depth our own source,' because power destroys the past, the past with its treasures of alternative ideals that stand in judgment on the present
 

Politician Maurice Schumann helped Weil to work with the Free French in London

Qu'aurais-je été si Alain ne m'avait appris à douter, Simone Weil à croire, Marc Sangnier à aimer et de Gaulle à combattre ? What would I have been if Alain hadn't taught me to doubt, Simone Weil to believe, Marc Sangnier to love and de Gaulle to fight?
 
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