2025/05/29 by Georgie Newson · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Contemporary Literature and Criticism #Philosophy and Literary Analysis #Short Stories in Global Literature
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/criq.12826
openalex publication_date 2025/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
For a short while she is here, and then, for some time, she is nowhere. In the years following her death she is a curiosity, an oddity and an enigma; or perhaps a neurotic, a narcissist and a fraud. She is a frigid anorexic, a fanatical communist and a self-hating Jew. She is dismissed by de Gaulle, scorned by Bataille and snubbed by Trotsky. But she acquires a starry coterie of defenders: Camus, T.S. Eliot and Iris Murdoch. She is published. She is translated. She is quoted. She is biographised. She is the Red Virgin and the Categorical Imperative in Skirts. She is anthologised. She is paraphrased. She is praised by the pope. She is written about by poets. She is a mystic. She is a heretic. She is a Great Jewish Thinker. She is a revolutionary. She is a theory of S&M. She is in memes. She is in Instagram handles. She is a tradcath. She is a sad girl. She is based. She is cringe. She is everywhere. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it.2 One reason it is so tempting to go along with Sontag, however, is because it can seem that what Weil asks of us is not merely difficult but somehow impossible: that her moral demands are too great for anyone—including she herself—to bear. Weil was obsessed with the idea of the impossible, forever denouncing things in her diaries as such: ‘to receive the good when one has not desired it’; ‘to be dependent upon human beings without aspiring to tyrannise over them’; ‘for men to forget God entirely’.4 She likened ‘the impossible in mathematical reasoning’—the ‘demonstration per absurdum’—to the ‘never in moral life’, stating that both, in their absolute prohibition, ‘transport us from time into eternity’.5 Yet she also maintained that ‘contradiction, impossibility, is the sign of the supernatural’: a ‘plenitude of reality impossible to actually reach’, like an ‘infinite series with a finite sum’.6 Weil's understanding of impossibility, which seems inextricable from her ethics, opens the way for us to think about her relationship with the psychoanalytic tradition, the classic texts of which are also littered with impossible objects, impossible desires and impossible states. It is easy to find psychoanalytic resonances in Weil's writings, especially when reading those great contemporary interlocutors of hers—Jacqueline Rose, Chris Kraus and Anne Carson—who are fluent in psychoanalytic discourses.7 When reading her documented engagements with psychoanalytic theorists, however, as well as her attempts to carve out an ethical framework that would be more robust than a mere interplay of resonances, it is difficult to shake the feeling that many of her writings actively resist assimilation to a psychoanalytic worldview. Again, there is something too frictional, too indigestible and too hardcore about her conclusions. But then if there is a discipline well-equipped to digest the indigestible, it is surely psychoanalysis. To take Weil's ethics seriously is to ask what kinds of moral philosophy the insights of psychoanalysis make possible or impossible, which is first of all to take seriously that there is a psychoanalytic ethics. It might also be a way of thinking about why figures like Weil exert such a hold on the cultural imaginary—what wishes and anxieties they incarnate. Weil's longest engagement with Freud comes in her lecture ‘After the Discovery of Mind’, which was delivered to high schoolers at the Roanne lycée in 1933, only a short while before leaving the teaching post for her stint in the factories. In the lecture, she takes issue with the Freudian understanding of the unconscious, substituting for it a Cartesian framework in which ‘ideas’ are either ‘clarified’ or ‘confused’. ‘Thought,’ she says, ‘is essentially conscious,’ and yet ‘one can always prevent oneself from formulating it completely’, such that certain ideas are preserved in a tumultuous state.8 It would therefore be possible, she suggests, to do away with the term ‘subconscious’ while retaining that of ‘repression’, provided we bear in mind that repression is merely ‘bad conscience’, or ‘the ability one has for self-deceit’.9 Weil's use of normative language here is deliberate; one of Freud's major shortcomings, she writes, was his characterisation of psychology as ‘something scientific’, when ‘it is before everything a moral question’.10 The theories of psychoanalysis imply that ‘one is in no way responsible for the things one represses,’ but for Weil, ‘one has every right to reproach someone for his subconscious thoughts; one has the right, and even the duty, to do so in own's own case; one has a duty to control them.’11 If, as Freud would surely have agreed, we ‘have to bring into the light of open day the monsters within us’, then ‘we are responsible for our evil as well as our good thoughts.’12 Although I cannot create a single one of my thoughts, all of them – from dreams, desires and passions to reasoned arguments – are, to the extent that they are subject to me, signs of myself; to the extent that they are not subject to me, signs of the other existence. To know this is to recall the double meaning in any thought; it is to make the obstacle appear in thought.13 Freud himself had noticed this convergence: his theory had, he said, inherited Plato's vision of the split soul but subverted it with the suggestion that the ego should operate not as a charioteer in total command of its charge, but as a ‘rider’ guiding the animal ‘where it wants to go’.15 Indeed, Weil's uncompromising allegiance to Plato entails a recognition of one of the most troubling insights of psychoanalysis, which is that the unconscious—being a tissue of the voices of real and imagined others—cannot be grappled with and restrained in the manner of the Platonic appetitive self. In this respect, Freud's allusion to Plato obscures his own radicalism: the transgressive unconscious is not, after all, a wayward animal to be commanded; it is what is produced by way of commandments—by prohibition, projection and law. As Jonathan Rajchman writes, Freud's ‘great discovery’ was that ‘we do not repress our desires because we have a conscience; we have a conscience because our desires are already repressed’.16 Weil's insistence on reframing ‘repressed’ thoughts as ‘essentially conscious’ proceeds from her wish to retain the idea that we are ‘responsible’ for the thoughts we do not wish to possess: responsible for acknowledging and redirecting them. But in psychoanalysis, the voice telling us that unwanted thoughts are our responsibility—our substance and our curse—is often not (as Plato would have it) a moral guide but a retributive contortion of the superego. The ‘conscience’ which evaluates the moral status of our repressed thoughts is in a sense just as epistemically challenged as Weil's repressive function, operating according not to a transcendent moral instinct but a conditioned reflex of self-punishment and its attendant enjoyments. The charioteer has vanished, and only the harnesses remain. The premise of Weil's critique of Freud—that it is possible to exert control over, and therefore to take responsibility for, one's psychic life—is the basis for certain tendencies in her philosophy that we might call ascetic. Using this term perhaps carries a risk of flattening a complex set of theses and practices into a general will-to-negation, but it seems to me that it captures Weil's self-conscious participation in a lineage of traditions and texts (Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, Zen Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita) as well as her idiosyncratic theological tendencies, which emphasised work, ritual and philosophical discipline rather than serendipitous mystic revelation. Weil's lectures at the lycée already deploy the language of ‘duty’, and the emphasis she placed on dutiful action would only grow more pronounced. ‘If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved,’ she wrote in a letter to Father Perron, her priest, in 1942, ‘I should still choose the way of obedience.’17 Weil was convinced that ‘the way of obedience’ required exposure to physical hardship, and told Perron that she ‘put this conception to the test’ by forcing herself into the ‘state of intense and uninterrupted misery’ induced by factory labour.18 Despite the traumas of this period, which left her feeling shocked whenever ‘any human being’ spoke to her ‘without brutality’, she never ceased to believe in the value of ‘redemptive suffering’, through which God might be accessed precisely by way of his absence: ‘the divine form of presence which corresponds to evil’.19 The idea of redemptive suffering is intrinsically linked to the ascetic practice for which Weil is perhaps best known: ‘decreation’.20 During the decreative process—attained by way of ‘unconsoled affliction’—the self is effaced, and its absence transformed into a vessel for grace.21 ‘The sin in me,’ Weil wrote in her notebooks, ‘says “I”.’22 She told Perron that her ‘greatest desire’ was to ‘lose not only all will but all personal being’.23 The attitude of psychoanalysis to asceticism—as with any practice that seems to promise sovereignty over desire—is ambivalent. At first glance, it may seem that the ascetic is precisely what psychoanalysis teaches us not to be or is perhaps an extreme version of what psychoanalysis tells us we already are: a subject prostrated before the law. Indeed, as the ascetic actively pursues their repressions, they do not merely defer to a structure of prohibition but forge an identification with it. What the bearer of this identification appears unable or unwilling to understand, it might be suggested, is that, as desire is maintained through its regulation, any attempt to curtail the demand to enjoy risks becoming an enjoyment of curtailment. The most pristine pleasures can be found in procedures of abstinence, denial and self-flagellation; this is one lesson of Lacan's coupling of Kant and de Sade. The ascetic believes that they can escape the law of their desire by substituting for it a different kind of law – perhaps divinely bestowed (the familiar Law of the Father), perhaps incarnate in a duty that would transcend even the Father's technologies of punishment (as per Weil's claim that her to God would the of But this is no escape from the it is a or even an of it. As Weil writes, the to the of and all her ‘greatest we this psychoanalytic reading of then Weil's a of the ascetic of which was so The in Weil's attitude is in her to the of the that her and my I and Yet psychoanalysis, its to ascetic has often as a kind of ascetic In ‘The and of and in that the in to a the of and the subject of absolute in on the years he that the of this is to bring about an that would unwanted by the of his own ego of all the of desire by which that has that he is the only one to have that the by the a certain to the as Zen without to the to which this is In he that ‘the moral in psychoanalysis is the one that is in the in what might be the Freudian ascetic that it I The of desire desire for the absolute all to the to of all to desire in the and to desire without any this said, Lacan's to the of psychoanalysis should us as it to a possible ascetic and Weil to psychoanalysis a kind of moral as we have not we might not be to from desire as but we can psychic as Freud it in of which desires to be by that to and in the or by their Yet Weil, in that we have a to our unwanted thoughts, psychoanalysis on the not only that it our as beings with a for but that it the of there any law in with which such control might be it is that if is a by which the unconscious is and then we ask what it is that this of and the relationship and prohibition the of law in the ethical then this appears to that any attempt to the unconscious into an in which the only reason to desire can be Indeed, this would be one of Lacan's that ‘the only of which one can be is of to one's In her Weil that she the psychoanalytic conception of was right, she that is of the as not, as a of or One can either upon any kind of God in this it be the or and a of the it It is only this that and only divine or that can this de that while to an of Weil's the desire and the one to what the to what the when his was from one would a great on the that ‘the is It is this that a for the ascetic subject and a for their to this kind of Weil a transcendent duty that would the of into divine ethics in the of the Freudian will be The of Weil's with Freud over the of be in the the basis for critique of Weil's ethics. that in an for the Law which is not but Weil to the into the to and the ethical with its of and the and in Weil's this and any law that would operate in to it, is for Weil an The is that which is and a is one that ‘we can by our and impossible she says, the possible in to the by way of the in with duty, of the of and we a psychoanalytic resonances are in to out of the What are we to make of Weil's of is a kind of not in the good is an on but the of ascetic practice is to or a that actually on a But I to something I that we take Weil's claim to be that in its form is not a but a In I the critique by Kant and then by Kant that there is no way of the of ‘the from the of a Freud that desire always always wants something other or more than that which would it. in that ‘the by Freud at the of the is to us that there is no the which is which is the is also the of is a and that there is no other here is to as he it on ‘the of to his as is for the good with as Weil writes, ‘is impossible: it its was that is only from and of when he in with a law for its own But psychoanalysis into the idea of a law of desire is at Weil's way out of the is to that to desire something is impossible, we have to desire what is ascetic desire for a desire the that from the of is precisely what our Weil's conception of duty not, like the of and it not take the form of a set of and delivered from a is critique she the that, as Weil in of the of ‘the Law should be as a divine not because of its but because it is Weil that through our duty, in the we would be to that an impossible would be and rather than the Weil would this idea by her in the of the of duty is even to think of Weil's claim that she would even if it It is the only of with to the most the law placed on us by which we can escape nor But why should it be the only possible What if we do not our duty to desire is For Weil, following the and the of are in the form of that on which the soul by it to the its The most and of a sense which have no more than a then, is not but its The produced by desire can only be by desire in the The of following this duty is that we are to we find to as as we can from as Kant the only but if it is to be the real be Weil's for this demand was But if on us in this even by way of then we surely a moral sense to the in the The with a duty ‘for its own as on Kant have for is that one something like dutiful is at dutiful is Weil, one might a kind of moral the might be an impossible but in the form of is But is this of thinking not what we find in The of psychoanalysis, as a practice and as a of is to by but by in Freud's theory may ethical into but the recognition of and of the suffering and is at its Although psychoanalysis has not in of a is why Weil it unable to an idea is not the is it not the duty of the after all, to guide the away from which is to In psychoanalysis and Weil's ethics, then, the to find to suffering the of law and desire is what the from theory to In psychoanalysis, this the of the for Weil, it and In both, the of an the unconscious and the a of desire that and entails from of Freud's of the of the or Lacan's to the that is in by what Weil not the of a will but ‘the of or of the kind of by which a her and her us that the not in a but is rather desire and if not rather than a to which we is the form and of this a of what duty, desire in the of to to the of language and to in all their the of the the and the we that is here, to the of the psychoanalytic or it should be that to desire in the was not, for Weil, to oneself from the from it. She of her which have so often as at with her mystic tendencies, as of ascetic and of her ascetic practice as She was by the way in which the of the and the of such that is for the things which have is she any to and to and the or before the time of in the to in to the were not just of to the but of the this Weil that the to oneself and to desire in the be if is to have For the she is a with the of the yet the is in every out by the of a day of the reality of the in his like a in the that would its to the of the redemptive suffering into and as well as the of a of desire that no or to all real in the It was this moral that Weil she had in But in this she I In psychoanalytic the that our inherited of and law are what the way for an ethics in many to Weil's a ethics, on the of the duty in the form of and a that would demand for I not the first to the that someone who a to after her have such an intense of But it is not in an when all that was more into that a like Weil should be it is not in an when all that was more into that a like Weil should be In a are to the of the and its with the of a and is a that can be with of extreme the hardcore is especially But if the ascetic is to us as an of they also a and the of that cannot a duty to which one could oneself in a an of the of forever to demand that we while of the which without might be the ascetic into a in which the of desire have no in which the law is But by the of this promise while the of Weil as of to use can that and the kind of required to it, at a are not of because we its we are of because we cannot Weil's ascetic and redemptive often as even by those who may they can seem or at as if Weil were her own life as a to a that would not it as But I believe this would be a was not, for Weil, from ethics and all inextricable of understanding of to and of to the of Weil's as the of we the in which her practices were to the and the of work, the and of the and the of in his to for Weil as a in an of our kind of But Weil would have by a moral in which to in a factory a while by to in a factory a of if would be a the of be Weil's after so time reading Weil, I still that of her escape me, into I to which was also by in his to and ‘I will to personal far a can ideas in to find for his But this is a in which Weil that great which with and him is that and are different it possible to to Weil's life, without it as or its becoming a to Weil in a in in to while for has about this which has in from an of with the of to a of she were her But of this can and claim that of Chris of her death to an of the many to her that the of Instagram and to as the ascetic is like is about to in the but not that of us which is away from this risks like an of Weil's an that no One that cannot be however, is that Weil ethical a of a in which the physical and desire is never far our Weil writes, like the desire for we always more than we can take But the and cannot be merely by out one term or the ‘The is is a to is to When we by to we can for a while a in which we might the of the of desire and the of is not a form of in which we would in to a that but is it When we love for the they can Weil writes, love them like It is an love she ‘is to love the in a human because all men are always one always loves all love Weil not for the she or the she but for her know that this who is and as as I is The of is a in at the of