Abstract
Robert Chenavier,
Simone Weil: Attention to the Real
, trans. Bernard E. Doering, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 2012; 104 pp.: 9780268023737, £16.95/$20.00 (pbk)
This short book on the intellectual work of Simone Weil will not serve as an introduction. Someone who knew nothing of her life and work would emerge from reading this book with scant knowledge of the former and an ungrounded idea of the latter. For an introduction, there are better alternatives. For those somewhat acquainted with Weil’s work or in possession of an introduction, however, Chenavier’s book could be very valuable in representing Weil’s intellectual and spiritual project as organized and focused. It succeeds in structuring her work around two big ideas: work and the spiritual.
The book itself is short, just seventy-six well-spaced pages. The translation is somewhat stiff, which could have been justified by greater precision. Sadly, it is inconsistent, eschewing the better established translation of key terms, for example malheur, in favour of variety. This serves to increase the distance from Weil and Chenavier’s French. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, the book’s brevity and open style make it breezy and engaging to read.
Chenavier is uncritical in his presentation of Weil’s thought: everything is presented as correct and a success contra those authors or ideas against which Weil was reacting. He rarely explains the ideas of those authors, so that there is little opportunity for the reader to decide whether to concur with Chenavier’s assessment. This is a key factor against the book as an introduction. In addition, to draw his synoptic picture of Weil’s thought Chenavier has to pick from her work with little regard for chronology or inter-relation. In consequence, a reader could think that Weil’s written work was more systematic than it is. In fact, much of her most important work is fragmentary, almost aphoristic, in form and many of her works (essays etc.) are disconnected from each other. Strangely, though these aspects of Chenavier’s work are apt to deceive, they are not obstacles to discerning the picture of Weil’s thought that he seeks to present.
Indeed Chenavier is eminently qualified to present a coherent picture of Weil’s thought. His involvement in the scholarly community around Weil’s work and his familiarity with any written element of her output is total. The fragmentary and unsystematic nature of Weil’s work is usually a barrier to understanding her thought. Reading Chenavier is like having a most knowledgeable curator take you on a carefully considered tour of her work and her ideas. The tour misses out some things in favour of describing a unity in her thought.
According to Chenavier, the unity in Weil’s thought consists of two parts. The first is Weil’s engagement with the influence of Marx and the situation of industrial labour in pre-war Europe. This led her to make work central to her account of the human condition. The second part is Weil’s conception of human beings as spiritual, where the spiritual is real, material and un-transcendent. Chenavier sees past the common error of conceiving Weil as an idealistic revolutionary who would overthrow the present wordly order by making the spiritual the source of a new, better world. Instead, Weil seeks to integrate work – including factory work – with the spiritual. Specifically, the conditions for work, which is essential to man’s being, must be structured to make possible the nourishment of our spiritual needs, or, as Weil puts it, the needs of the soul. In this way, men and women could live in a here and now illuminated by the good, rather than seeking to live in a ‘society with divine pretensions’.
Chenavier’s picture of Weil’s thought, while certainly incomplete, is worth the effort of overcoming its shortcomings in this translation of his book.