It's way too quiet on the book front on here so let me post something on a terrific new book on a true heroine of mine, Simone Weil. Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders”, General De Gaulle called her even insane, she was without a doubt one of the last century’s most remarkable thinkers albeit a bit subversive nevertheless. Her thoughts on how spirituality is gained by just studying is something that I still hold to heart today. She was both a modest woman and a French intellectual who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. Her short life shines very much like a grand magnificent intermezzo between the two world wars. She taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers in France, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, labored alongside workers on assembly lines back in France, joined the Free French movement in London and died there mainly some say because of tuberculosis aggravated by the undernourishment that she let herself go through. Both she and later on Cesar Chavez starved their bodies regularly for higher spiritual and emotional reasons, but these periods of said undernourishment very much hastened their deaths. Robert Zaretsky, however, gives us now also a different Weil in his book, exploring great insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side to Weil that balances her many, many contradictions. The book honours in equal importance the complexity of Weil's thought and the description of why it all matters and will continue to fascinate many future readers to come. Here's a link to the author's reply to a review in the New York Review of last year:
