Simone Weil (1909-1943)

Purchasing a newly republished book of a long dead writer one can’t help but read the scores of modern advertisements on the front cover, back cover, and first pages. In certain cases, however incorrect or unethical, they often read “prophetic”, “years ahead of its time”, or “as relevant for modern readers as it was _______”. None of these comments would be relevant to a volume of Simone Weil’s work, but all of them would find their way to its front cover (that is if her work were in fact deemed fit for republication.) This is due, I believe she’d argue, to the fact that the current state of affairs is in fact Simone Weil's state of affairs; nothing whatsoever has changed. The empirical philosophy of her writings is that of an all too expectant eschatology, an eschatology that creeps, slower than I think she suspected, towards realization. She is the true modern philosopher and yet read not at all.

Despite much good work, if not by way of a certain bias, NYRB Classics should be ashamed of selecting the readily available Weil essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force for joint publication with a Rachel Bespaloff essay on the same subject. They’ve matched Simone Weil, one of the geniuses of 20th century philosophy, with a well intentioned cultural critic. A modern publishing house must surely have been conscious of publishing the least inflammatory essay of a writer whose work invalidates three fourths of their catalogue and indirectly assails most every writer they've used for their commissioned introductions.