Subversive Simone Weil

Robert Zaretsky is the author of Boswell's Enlightenment; A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning; and Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment, among other books. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, he lives in Houston with his wife, children, and assorted pets.

• PrefaceIntroductionChapter One The Force of AfflictionChapter Two Paying AttentionChapter Three The Varieties of ResistanceChapter Four Finding RootsChapter Five The Good, the Bad, and the GodlyEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"Simone Weil was merciless (not least on herself), sometimes alarming, always compelling, and unavoidably significant. This is a beautifully sharp and thoughtful account of her life and work--a fascinating read."--Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Cafe Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others;"Zaretsky's work is unfailingly eloquent, fascinating, and relevant. In treating both her life and her writings, The Subversive Simone Weil displays a subject who, by going too far toward goodness, reminds so many of us that we have not gone far enough. In Zaretsky's hands, her courage stands as a complicated but necessary lesson for us all." --Todd May, author of A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us;"Reading Zaretsky's absorbing and tender intellectual portrait of Simone Weil, I was reminded on every page of her astonishing relevance to our own times. With her demanding vision of the life well lived, in her extreme judgments and through her punishing empathy, Weil emerges here as a figurehead for the intellectual and ethical challenges of the current moment. As he has done so beautifully in his books on Camus, Zaretsky has opened Weil's life and work to our understanding. For readers familiar with Weil's, The Subversive Simone Weil is a valuable synthesis; for those coming to her for the first time, an inspiring primer."--Alice Kaplan, author of Looking for "The Stranger" Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic