Simone Weil is one of the most challenging and yet beguiling thinkers of the twentieth century.
There is a highly charged mystical current that runs through her life and works that seems
almost timeless. And yet Weil was a keen observer of the modern condition coming of age as she
did during the 1930s. Amid the recurrent indignities and inhumanities of modern life she
wondered what is to become of the precious space we have for grace for friendship and for
truth? One of our most astute historians of existentialism Robert Zaretsky shifts his
attention to the utterly original Simone Weil with this new book. Taking up the central
elements of her philosophy-affliction attention resistance roots and spirituality-he
explores how they animated her life and how they might animate ours--
