Sophocles with a Spanner: Simone Weil’s Radical Use of Paul Valéry’s Thought for the Dignification of Labour

In the late nineteenth century, for figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Oscar Wilde, art occupied a metaphysical stature once given to theology. Paul Valéry, firmly rooted in this tradition through his master, Mallarmé, contributed to it a detailed set of writings on the inspiration through which poetry is formed and on how poetry, once created, provides understanding. Simone Weil greatly admired Valéry for these writings, but, rather than conceiving the metaphysical understanding of art to be principally available to those who rose above the commerce of bourgeois life into the sphere of leisured aesthetes, according to her, those who more readily attended to the world aesthetically were labourers. For Weil, poetry belonged most naturally to labourers, and she reconceived the canon by this light. Weil repurposed Valéry’s works to solve the problem of alienation in labour: if poetry could fill the workplace, then it would inspire the labourer such that they would know their work to be part of a cosmic whole. Labour would be poeticized.