The second installment in a two-part exploration of Simon(e) Weil for the ongoing Antifascist Christianity series and the Antifascist Woodshed project.
At the heart of the episode is Weil’s terse, luminous definition of love—“belief in the existence of other human beings as such”—and Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s unpacking of how that love rejects projections and demands the generosity of attention, shared joys and miseries, and a deprivatized ethic of care. Matthew contrasts this with caricatures of Weil as an ascetic or body-denier, arguing instead for a portrait of a neurodivergent activist whose stressed nervous system made hypocrisy intolerable and whose spirituality emerged from embodied encounters.
Weil presented a lot of scrambling data—gender nonconformity, ambivalent sexuality, eating and touch aversions, migraines and hypergraphia. Theological and philosophical commentators often pathologize or misread Weil, while sidestepping their autism. As for Weil’s Christianity: it wasn’t about churchly allegiance but an experiential, anti-hypocrisy faith that found Jesus in direct action and in taking liturgical symbols seriously enough to live them. For Weil, “this is my body” became a present-tense statement of antifascist solidarity: the breaking and sharing of bread and body as an F-you to the imperials, and a call to communal repair.
Show Notes:Coles, Robert. Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2001.
Fitzgerald, Michael. The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006.
Gilman-Opalsky, Richard. The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020.
Lawson, Kathryn. Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil. New York: Routledge, 2024. doi:10.4324/9781003449621.
McCullough, Lissa. The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2014.
Plant, Stephen. Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction. Revised and expanded edition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008.
Song, Youming, Tingting Nie, Wendian Shi, Xudong Zhao, and Yongyong Yang. "Empathy Impairment in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Conditions From a Multidimensional Perspective: A Meta-Analysis." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (October 9, 2019): 01902. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01902.
Wallace, Cynthia R. The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. With a preface by T. S. Eliot. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Weil, Simone. Modern Classics Simone Weil: An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. London: Penguin Books, 2005.
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