| Abstract
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What precisely is at stake in Simone Weil’s shift to Christianity? Is it only the story of a modern agnostic intellectual discovering and reinventing an old religious tradition? What if, under the surface of that move, modernity itself is as much at stake? What if Weil’s mystical thought conceals a profound reflection on the modern subject? It is true, in line with almost the entire pre-modern and modern mystical tradition, her thought is a full-blown attack against the Cartesian ego and its pretention to be the solid and free basis of our modern relation to reality. But what if the most interesting aspect of Weil’s thought is that she fails in that attack, and that, despite all her efforts to destroy that subject, that very subject resists even in the very heart of both the mystical truth she describes and in her theoretical thought about that truth. What if Weil’s move to Christianity does not say so much about Christianity, nor about the Christian side of modernity, but about the abysmal base of modernity’s subject? What precisely is at stake in Simone Weil’s shift to Christianity? Is it only the story of a modern agnostic intellectual discovering and reinventing an old religious tradition? What if, under the surface of that move, modernity itself is as much at stake? What if Weil’s mystical thought conceals a profound reflection on the modern subject? It is true, in line with almost the entire pre-modern and modern mystical tradition, her thought is a full-blown attack against the Cartesian ego and its pretention to be the solid and free basis of our modern relation to reality. But what if the most interesting aspect of Weil’s thought is that she fails in that attack, and that, despite all her efforts to destroy that subject, that very subject resists even in the very heart of both the mystical truth she describes and in her theoretical thought about that truth. What if Weil’s move to Christianity does not say so much about Christianity, nor about the Christian side of modernity, but about the abysmal base of modernity’s subject? What precisely is at stake in Simone Weil’s shift to Christianity? Is it only the story of a modern agnostic intellectual discovering and reinventing an old religious tradition? What if, under the surface of that move, modernity itself is as much at stake? What if Weil’s mystical thought conceals a profound reflection on the modern subject? It is true, in line with almost the entire pre-modern and modern mystical tradition, her thought is a full-blown attack against the Cartesian ego and its pretention to be the solid and free basis of our modern relation to reality. But what if the most interesting aspect of Weil’s thought is that she fails in that attack, and that, despite all her efforts to destroy that subject, that very subject resists even in the very heart of both the mystical truth she describes and in her theoretical thought about that truth. What if Weil’s move to Christianity does not say so much about Christianity, nor about the Christian side of modernity, but about the abysmal base of modernity’s subject? What precisely is at stake in Simone Weil’s shift to Christianity? Is it only the story of a modern agnostic intellectual discovering and reinventing an old religious tradition? What if, under the surface of that move, modernity itself is as much at stake? What if Weil’s mystical thought conceals a profound reflection on the modern subject? It is true, in line with almost the entire pre-modern and modern mystical tradition, her thought is a full-blown attack against the Cartesian ego and its pretention to be the solid and free basis of our modern relation to reality. But what if the most interesting aspect of Weil’s thought is that she fails in that attack, and that, despite all her efforts to destroy that subject, that very subject resists even in the very heart of both the mystical truth she describes and in her theoretical thought about that truth. What if Weil’s move to Christianity does not say so much about Christianity, nor about the Christian side of modernity, but about the abysmal base of modernity’s subject?
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