e don’t admire Simone Weil because we agree with her, Susan Sontag argued in 1963: ‘I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas.’ What we admire, Sontag thought, is her extreme seriousness, her absolute effort to become ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’, to make herself a person who is ‘rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Sontag underestimates the power of Weil’s ideas, I think, but she is right to say that in the minds of readers, Weil’s thought and life are intrinsically connected. Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.
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