Essaying Collective Life: Review of Benjamin P. Davis's Simone Weil's Political Philosophy

Essaying Collective Life:Review of Benjamin P. Davis's Simone Weil's Political Philosophy Isabelle Laurenzi (bio) Benjamin P. Davis, Simone Weil's Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. 184 pp. $95.00 (hc). ISBN: 9781538171943. Simone Weil has captured the attention of readers inside and outside the academy, from Iris Murdoch to Susan Sontag. Yet she remains relatively marginal in theoretical discourses. Her life was short, her writing both vivid and perplexing. In his ambitious monograph, Simone Weil's Political Philosophy, Benjamin P. Davis sets out to reclaim Weil both for political and critical theory and for contemporary reflection on life amidst capitalism and empire. Born in France in 1909, Weil studied philosophy and lived as a scholar and activist, taking shifts at Parisian factories to understand working-class experiences. She explored Catholic mysticism, joined the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War, and faced dislocation due to her Jewish heritage during WWII. At age 34, while exiled, she died of complications from tuberculosis—and, famously, for refusing to eat more than would have been available to the occupied French. Beyond these biographical contours, Davis thoughtfully interweaves finer details of Weil's brief but eventful life throughout the book. The effect is a contextually rich encounter that reads neither as intellectual biography nor textual primer. Such an encounter is significant in the sense that the context of Weil's work is integral for understanding her ideas, which traversed philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature in the form of essays, journals, and her 1943 book The Need for Roots. Davis's reclamation centers Weil as a philosopher: "The overarching contention of this book is that Weil's critical relationship to collectivity and unyielding criticism of social life in her oppressive context stems not from genius, saintliness, or illness but from the fact that she was a philosopher" (5). For Davis, the relevant features of philosophers include a methodology; being "out of place" and out of time; having a critical attitude grounded in one's current political and cultural environment; and developing one's thought over a lifetime, rather than dogmatically advancing a pure philosophy (4–8). In a careful analysis of Weil's method, Davis draws on Weil's own descriptions of her work and motivations from her notebooks and letters. He also discerns resonances between Weil's essays and the various forms of activism which immediately followed her writings. In the first substantive chapter, Davis characterizes Weil's method as doubly essayistic: it involved the essay as genre and alternately "inquiring" and "essaying," writing and testing ideas in life (15, 25). This is why for Davis, making sense of Weil's political philosophy requires attending to the immediate events of her life. Conversely, because being a philosopher involves a critical attitude towards the world one inhabits, scholars [End Page 315] who overlook how Weil's writings were grounded in her own "essaying" activities may underestimate just how philosophical her work was. In five substantive chapters, Davis brings together Weil's political writings, both formal and informal. He aptly describes the subject of these writings as an extended, shifting analysis of collective life (4). Davis arranges his chapters in a tidy structure: each of the first four chapters focuses on political concepts that Weil critiqued. In the fifth chapter, Davis argues that Weil's critiques cohere in her more constructive contributions in The Need for Roots, published the year she died. Davis pairs each chapter with current discourses in political and critical theory: Weil's critique of revolution with discourses on resistance and resilience in feminist thought; her critique of colonialism with anticolonial thought on epistemology and grievability; her critique of marketized models of selfhood with critiques of neoliberal subjectivity; her critique of human rights with contemporary critiques of inclusion and tolerance; and her theory of building roots with contemporary considerations of community and belonging amidst continual racialized state violence. The topics chronologically mirror Weil's writing, allowing Davis to narrate biographic details as the chapters unfold. One motivation for reframing Weil as a political philosopher is to avoid the tendencies of both scholarly and cultural accounts of Weil to mythologize—and pathologize—her, whether...