(via R. William, to give him his R&B name)

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force–not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self–these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live.

Susan Sontag in 1963 - 1963! - on Simone Weil. It has to be said that I disagree with Sontag’s liberal bourgeois ironism, her insinuation that what one really values (i.e. enjoys, presumably vicariously) about a figure like Weil or Dworkin is their personal martyrdom, which serves as proof of a sincerity vouchsafed to them of which we remain incapable. I don’t believe I find the death-agonies of saints especially alluring (although that’s not the sort of thing one necessarily would know about oneself until it was in a sense too late and the libidinal investment had already been made). It’s the death-drive of someone like Weil, her determination to owe as little as possible to life, health, fecundity and the promise of future happiness, that grabs me.

Weil’s life and thought is a systematic repudiation of the claim, implicit in all hedonistic ethics, that what the human creature lives for is selfish increase. Her problem in a sense was that that was what she thought the human creature did live for; therefore she believed it was necessary to “decreate” it in order to realize an alternative subjective destination. She embodied, in exemplary fashion, what Badiou calls the destructive passion for the real, for which ultimately every visible manifestation must be treated as suspect, as an expression of the power of the false which makes this world.

It might be thought that there is enough suspicion lavished upon the human creatureliness of women without them joining in, as it were, in a sort of hysterical over-identification. Sontag says of Weil, “[n]o one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves”, and it’s true that I wouldn’t urge Weil’s fanaticism, or Dworkin’s, on any person towards whom I meant well. I would not be delighted to see my own daughter become a self-loathing anorexic, even one illuminated by a holy passion for the truth. I take pleasure in seeing my friends happy, not broken down or struggling in violent extremity. But it is also true that what I honour most in people is their ability to tear themselves away from happiness in order to see further, understand more, participate in the construction of a good greater than themselves. Let happiness come as it will, like unhappiness, “overnight, overnight”.

Sontag’s closing description of Weil as “the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas” has the ring of truth (or perhaps just the zing of excitement), but is motivated partly by Sontag’s own inability - which she took to be typical of her age and class - to identify fully with any idea, and the resulting sense that only excruciation can authenticate, or register the full force of, an intellectual commitment. There have been saints who were both sincere and serene and who, even if they were martyred in the end, were not personally drawn or driven to martyrdom. It should also be said that Weil was by no means consistent in her ideas, and that her inner personality, her animal selfhood, seems to have been able to survive any number of drastic conversions, reversals of fortune and farcical developments in the overlapping spheres of action and ideology. To identify with an idea is not after all to become its creation, “decreate” oneself as one might.