History of Ideas: Simone Weil

This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected. What does Weil have to put in their place? The answer is radical and surprising.

Read ‘Human Personality’ here For more on Weil from the LRB archive: Toril Moi on living like Weil  ‘If we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart.’ Alan Bennett on Kafka and Weil ‘Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said: “Oh! How much I would have preferred her to be happy.”’ 

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