Simone Weil’s Uprooted

For Simone Weil, deracination was the tragic condition of modern times, affecting not only refugees and the dispossessed, but all who capitalism and colonialism had torn from their roots. This chapter turns to her last works to connect her work on rootlessness to Weil’s critique of human rights. ‘To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides,’ she wrote. Rights are there to be fought for, contracted, defended; as such, they have served the same forces of expansion and domination that, as she demonstrated in her sublime wartime reading of the Iliad, relentlessly transform the living into ‘things’. Nobody from the period went further into the dark background of difference than Weil. The problem was that she could not find a way out. In the end, Weil’s efforts to live by charity alone—to root oneself in the suffering of others—were as death-driven as the forces of injustice and imperialism she railed against.