What is Simone Weil’s “inner light”?
In a recent essay, Gil Caroz invites us to heed Jacques-Alain Miller’s call, in the context of the formation of La Movida Zadig, to take “inspiration from Simone Weil and to create a group where each member is oriented by an exclusive fidelity to his own inner light, that is to say his own way of thinking things and not to an external authority or to a common and consensual ideal”. 1 This call is echoed in Bogdan Wolf’s introduction to Contemporary Heretic. For Caroz, Weil provides an example of how the “revolt” of the one, even as it resonates through others, “retains its original character of a singular symptom.” 2 I want to pause on this example and look a little more closely at Weil, her symptom, and what she means by the “inner light”.
Certainly, Simone Weil elaborated in her own way a revolutionary and post-revolutionary thought in the 1930s, for example, in “Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” and other texts published in La Critique sociale. In the 1940s, before the end of her short life, she sought to demonstrate the political power of mysticism. At the beginning of her Reflections”, Weil points to the rising threat of populism and authoritarianism, the vulnerabilities of democracy, the crisis of truth and meaning, anxieties about economic and technological “progress”, and the loss of orientation following the disintegration of traditional structures. These concerns resonate today. In her final text, she called for the abolition of political parties because they are essentially populist means for the totalitarian imposition of collective passions and dogma. It is in this text that she speaks of the “inner light”. It is quite simply the desire for truth, although there is nothing simple about it:
“How can we desire truth if we have no prior knowledge of it? This is the mystery of all mysteries. Words that express a perfection which no mind can conceive of – God, truth, justice, silently evoked with desire, but without any preconception, have the power to lift up the soul and flood it with light. It is when we desire truth with an empty soul and without attempting to guess its content that we receive the light”. 3 Truth is nothing other than the desire for it, the tautological effect of the drive of the nothing of the subject around the nothing of the object. 4 “Truth is all the thoughts that surge in the mind of a thinking creature whose unique, total, exclusive desire is for the truth”. 5 Ultimately, the interior light of the truth is guaranteed by God, the only end in itself, but God is also nothing other than one’s desire or love for it. In Gravity and Grace, Weil writes, “I am quite sure there is no God, in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word”. At the same time, “I am quite sure there is a God in the sense that my love is no illusion”. 6 In her essay on “Forms of the Implicit Love of God”, Weil contends that while it is impossible for God to love his creation directly, since he does not exist and has no relation to existence, there are ways by which one might come across such a love. For her, the way is neither the highway nor a minor road, but a labyrinth, full of miss-steps and false turns in which the lost soul might, with enough courage, find himself by chance at the centre where, rather than the Minotaur, “God is waiting to eat him”. 7 This fantasy of devouring, that Lacan called the “altrified term of the oral drive”, 8 is perhaps a screen that masks and points towards a childhood event.
When she was five months old, Weil’s mother contracted a case of appendicitis, but was still able to nurse and feed her child. Baby Simone, however, began to struggle for nourishment at the breast and became ill. Her biographer Simone Pétrement writes: “years later she used to joke about this precocious decline, apparently due to the fact that her mother’s milk had been affected by her illness. With a smile she would complain that she had been poisoned in infancy. That’s why, she would say, ‘I am such a failure.’“ 9 The translation of C’est pour ça, disait-elle, que je suis tellement ratée 10 is rather curious, however. The verb rater can mean to fail, but not usually in the sense of fail intellectually or in one’s career. It more often means to mess up, or to miss; to bungle; to muff; to fluff; to misfire or to botch something. 11 In the context of poison, rater, a homonym of ratée, might also mean “to rat”, as in rater quelqu’un, to rat on someone. So, there are potentially three or even four meanings at play in this sentence.
By all accounts, Weil was “spectacularly clumsy”. 12 While her difficulties rolling the cigarettes she chain-smoked may be excused, she struggled to perform any of the physical tasks demanded by the factory work she forced herself to undertake. Unable to handle a gun, she nevertheless volunteered to fight for the Republicans in the International Brigade in Spain. Ironically, she was saved from death by stumbling into a boiling pot of oil. In recovery, but in great pain away from the front, she heard that her unit had been smashed by Franco’s army: “Every woman in the company had been killed.” 13 Her other characteristic feature was throughout her life to betray every political identity or collective affiliation to which she belonged or came close: her femininity, her Jewishness, her nation, political party or collective. While she is claimed as a Christian mystic, she refused to be baptised because she would not separate herself from the unbelievers and the damned. 14 In 1938, Weil’s ratage in the labyrinth at last found God. A young Englishman introduced her to George Herbert’s poem “Love (III)”. She writes that while experiencing “a moment of intense physical suffering, when I was forcing myself to feel love, but without desiring to give a name to that love”, Weil began repeating the poem to herself. “It was during one of these recitations that Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” 15 In the poem, God (“Love”) bids a repentant sinner to enter His presence, “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat”. 16 Christ’s presence felt “more personal, more certain, more real than that of a human being, though inaccessible to the sense and the imagination.” 17 In her discussion of the event, Pétrement hesitates to give it credence as a Christian miracle, preferring to concede its “mystery”, on the one hand, and Weil’s certainly on the other: “the certainty of having touched something real that lies beyond subjectivity”. 18 No doubt, it cannot be true that Christ came down from heaven and made himself known to Weil, but at the same time it was real.
There is a difference between the true and the real in psychoanalysis that is disclosed by analysis, and also by hallucinations. In his teaching, Lacan argues that hallucination calls the primacy of historicization, narrative and the truth that is an effect of its interpretation into question, presenting it as a “phenomenon that escapes history as well as the subjective and semantic reworking of truth”. 19 The hallucination refers to content that has not been symbolized and is unhistoricisable as a result: “Hallucinations are the mark of an irreducible real that surmounts the true.” 20 Since hallucinations are part of a being’s experience, but have their own space outside the world, they could be called, in Weil’s term, surnaturel. Jacques-Alain Miller has elaborated this difference between history and the real by suggesting that the subject who suffers (or enjoys) hallucinations “does not remain confined within the construction of the world but endeavours to rediscover a native opening onto being, which already marks a border or limit in relation to the world.” 21
Being // world
Opening construction
To which we could add Weil’s own equivalent oppositions that are for her effects of a double law that allows for both the evident indifference of matter and its “mysterious complicity” with the surnaturel appearance of beauty and instances of grace:
Surnature // matter
beauty necessity
grace gravity
detachment attachment
attention will
The left-hand column lists the concepts that Weil uses to elucidate the promise of La connaissance surnaturel, which for its realization requires examples of savoir – “detachment”, and “attention” that “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by [the inner light of] the object.” 22 Supremely, it required, for Weil, “affliction”, the jouissance of an ascetic practice directed towards the register of being rather than having, as is common with mystics. Éric Laurent writes, “the jouissance of privation … is to manufacture a plus for oneself on the basis of a subtraction in having … this being is a being on the outside, it is not a being in the register of having, it cannot be “in”, it cannot be possessed”. 23 This, then, is the surnaturel gift of love that the mystic contributes to politics: a politics of attention, detachment, beauty and grace, evident only in the lightning flashes of inner light that escape the laws of the world and allow a glimpse of the Good beyond any horizon of having, turning rater into “the beauty of the world… coming through matter.” 24 Simone Weil’s “affliction”, in which God’s love was manifested through the hunger that consumed her body, was the centre of her philosophical system. It also killed her, aged just 34. In 1943, her “anorexia” fatally compromised her struggle against tuberculosis.
1 Caroz, G., “Why Does Politics Need to Be Enlightened by Psychoanalysis Today?” Psychoanalytic Notebooks Nr 32, pp. 105–114. London: Karnac, 2018, p. 112.
2 ibid., p. 111.
3 Weil, S., On the Abolition of All Political Parties. New York: NYRB, 2013, p. 22.
4 Lacan, J., The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, London, Penguin, 1977, p. 104.
5 Weil, S., On the Abolition, p. 21.
6 Weil, S., Gravity and Grace, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 114.
7 Weil, S., Waiting for God, London: Harper Modern Classics, 2009, p. 103.
8 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 195.
9 Pétrement, S., Simone Weil: A Life, New Y: Schocken Books, 1976, p. 7.
10 Pétrement, S., La vie de Simone Weil. Paris: Fayard, 1973, p. 7.
11 Lacan uses this term throughout Seminar XX to refer to the failure of the object and the sexual rapport.
12 Yourgrau, Simone Weil, London: Reaktion Books, 2011, p. 18.
13 Ibid, p. 60.
14 Weil, S., Waiting for God, p. 3–10.
15 Ibid., p. 26–7.
16 Herbert, G., The English Poems of George Herbert (Oxford: Everyman, 1995), p. 192.
17 Weil, S., Waiting for God, p. 27.
18 Pétrement, S., The Life of Simone Weil, p. 341.
19 Miller, J.-A., “The Space of a Hallucination”, The Lacanian Review 6 (2018): pp. 83–108, p. 93.
20 Ibid., p. 93.
21 Ibid., p. 97.
22 Weil, S., An Anthology, ed. S. Miles, London and New York: Penguin, 2005, p. 8.
23 Laurent, E., “Feminine positions of being”, The Later Lacan, ed. Bogdan Wolf and Véronique Voruz (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 222–243, p. 240.
24 Weil, S., Waiting for God, p. 103.