Akademik

(1909–1943)

French mystic. Weil published only articles, and no definitive interpretation of her thought exists. She lived a life of dedicated deprivation, and eventually starved herself to death as a kind of symbolic participation in Jewish suffering during the Second World War. Her work was collected in Cahiers (3 volumes, 1951–6, trs. as The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 1956). It is centred upon the eventual contradictory nature of rational thought, and the resulting need for the way of mysticism, in which the self becomes annihilated through unification with divine love.