1.2 - Simone Weil: Necessity and Courage

Summary

‘C’est par le travail’, writes Simone Weil, ‘que le raison saisit le monde et s’empare de l’imagination folle.’¹ Work was for Weil, as Alain Supiot puts it, the ‘site of our inscription in the natural order of the world; work puts our imagination to the test of reality’ (Supiot, 2010b: 3). It is the medium of our engagement and the site where our creativity comes up against the materiality of practice, for Weil quite literally, with her preoccupation with work ‘being brought up before matter devoid of lenience’.² Her philosophy of work, says Supiot, ‘embeds itself and takes root [s’enracine] in the world of the factory’ (2010b: 2). And what cost this embedding had for Weil, who suffered years of ill-health and depression in her insistence that the workers would not be spoken for, that only her own partaking in the practice would authorise her speaking position, one that this eternal outsider never properly managed to claim for herself.