We have a curious 2025 left. While we like films Sundays by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa portray with finesse and delicacy the collapse of a family while the eldest daughter aspires, through a process of vocational discernment, to integrate into a cloistered convent, mystical inspiration for Rosalía in her new album Lux causes a flood of texts, more than any of us can carefully read, that explore an alleged Catholic turning point of youth or society in general, or they evoke the contemporary search for transcendence in a world where certainties have long been buried.
The Sexto Piso publishing house translates Mysticisman essay by Simon Critchley who asks his readers if they would not like to live the very intense mystical experience of figures such as Julian of Norwich or Teresa of Ávila, today linked to the aesthetic explorations of creators such as TS Eliot, Anne Carson or Nick Cave. A 20th century French thinker, nicknamed “the Martian” by her favorite teacher Alain – because she was a Martian, in a strange mix of mysticism, commitment and anarchism – appears in headlines, reports, essays, books to carry in your pocket or on your bag. travel bag and even on the vinyl of the fourth movement of the album by the only contemporary Spanish singer capable of breaking the reproduction record even in Germany with a semi-lyrical composition in which she collaborates with Björk, placing herself among the three most listened to artists globally or accumulating more than 40 million plays on the day of its release. The ways of the Lord, so inscrutable, lead to Simone Weil, the ‘red virgin’, who to some seems to be a pop icon today.
It is worth asking where and for whom exactly Simone Weil, whom Simone de Beauvoir envied “her heart capable of beating through the entire universe,” achieves this degree of iconicity in our time. It is not an exclusively Spanish phenomenon: in October 2023 Penguin Classics published a new edition of Put down roots, which shows that we are faced with a rather international relevance. But I didn’t talk about it even once with Carlos Ortega, one of Simone Weil’s translators, when Ortega was director of the Cervantes Institute in Hamburg, and he shared the impression: there is indeed a renewed interest in Weil’s work. Publishers like Trotta have been recovering her texts in Spain for years, and international academic publications citing the author have increased; What seems to have broken, especially since 2019, is the membrane that separated the concerns of academics or a cultural elite from those of a somewhat more general reading public.
The thesis that is most difficult for me to accept is the one that would consider that this is due to a significant recovery in the religious belonging of young people, or to an absolute theocentric turn of society: the indicators say nothing of the sort and our Western world continues to be rather secularised. Yes, a more recurring conversation about the need for transcendence has emerged. Why do these themes act as a refuge value? One, just like the background echo of the tradwivesdue to the post-pandemic need to find shelter, in general, whatever that may be; a rope to tie yourself to, an absolute when the world collapses and there is no future. Two: because, when all apparently rational institutions have fallen, we return to living in irrationalist and romantic times, which find expression equally in pro-Catholic aesthetics, in neo-rural narratives or in conspiracy theories. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Weil, as a figure, fits this model well. She is innovative, committed, visionary in her time; There has been talk from the moment of another radical break in institutions and certainties, just as Europe was shaken by two world wars; Not only does it place the idea of transcendence at the centre, but it also does so with that of precariousness, talking about the workers’ question. It is not pure theory: he embodies it and lives it in his praxis to disgusting extremes. It is precisely from that threshold that Weil’s discomfort begins and where, in reality, we prefer to forget it.
In Why doesn’t Simone Weil worry?, a text written for The jump More than three years ago, at the beginning of 2022, Leonor Cervantes wondered about the gap in interest in Simone Weil’s life compared to the disinterest generated by her thinking: “no thinker will be emancipatory if she is reduced to a woman who cried a lot and very well”. More than his thoughts, we remember Weil’s mortifications, his self-destructive impulse, which can turn into another episode in the life of a saint. If we look at politics, we remember his participation on the front, in the Resistance and in the Durruti Column; By paralleling her with Rabia al Adawiyya, a Muslim saint and mystic, Rosalía places the other main aspect of Simone Weil at the center. It is that of this philosopher as a mystical, enigmatic and spiritual character; Dangerously, she is also the most marketable Simone Weil, given how her message has been spread.
A disturbing certainty: if you have read Simone Weil, you may believe that she wrote books that are not hers, and it is certain that you will not have read her as she would have wanted them published. Simone Weil has never written a book titled The desirenor written friendship, nor did he write Love. The work done by a publisher like Hermida is commendable, but all these texts are neo-books, compositions created starting from Notebooks which the author wrote throughout her life, and which from that edition onwards become confused: it is easier to deal with an aphorist, a Weil in pieces of a diary, than with her frayed thoughts. It is not easy to assume his status as a sketch or, if we dare to go a little further, as an amputated project, even amputated alone, due to his premature end, his suicide.
Weil wrote many magazine articles during his lifetime, but did not publish any books as such; We owe much of its reception to what Albert Camus did with his work in the collection Expoir of Gallimard. Put down roots It is not a book: it is above all a commission from General de Gaulle, who instead of accepting her participation on the front line, as he would have liked, asked her for a report on French post-war reconstruction. Waiting for God They are letters and notes. The working condition: letters, articles, fragments of his diary. It is difficult for us to reproach the publishers of 2025 for carrying out exercises similar to those Camus did in his time, through which all reception of Weil is filtered, but perhaps there is something more typical of marketing than of thought in the Weil that is sold today if we compare it with Gallimard’s target readership more than seventy years ago.
Weil’s vision of God, for example, is much more uncomfortable than the one promoted by aestheticization. He is not an intervened God, to whom we can ask anything in prayer, not even to take care of us, but rather the model that we must imitate to decreate, to empty ourselves to achieve “the abdication of a God completely absent from the universe” in search of the realization of an impersonal ideal, radically interested in another that establishes a radical interdependence. Weil demands emptying: “the only way to the truth is through the annihilation of oneself: remaining for a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.”
He proposed something similar when, in his program of what the government should do after the Liberation of France, Weil postulated a new patriotism, far from any epic or masculine heroism, far from the Napoleonic ideal that had governed France for so long or from the figure of the providential man that De Gaulle himself would become: a merciful patriotism, inspired by compassion, affliction and pain, which would have the same feeling for France that struck Joan d’Arco when it was on fire. A patriotism that would give “the poorest part of the people a privileged moral place”. Weil was saddened by the lack of listening and attention to the poor, the afflicted, taking up the underlying theme of Léon Bloy, for whom what was intolerable to reason was “that a man is born full of goods and another at the bottom of a manure, as the Word of God was born in a stable, out of hatred for the World”.
The “red virgin” is a pop icon because, prescriptively, it has fascinated prescribers and cultural creators who find – we find – in it a crystallization of all the echoes of the last century that resonate in our time, and there has been so much talk about Weil in recent years that this obsession has begun to permeate further; The problem is that it also triumphs because, in the monstrous capacity of the market and the cultural industry to absorb everything, it is an aestheticized image, a fateful ideal of self-sacrifice, a harmless model if some parts are removed. The best thing we can do is forget Simone Weil, the most popular Weil, and think methodically about her concepts and misfortunes: decreate her and distance ourselves from her as she abdicates the God she believed in by completely denying the corruptions of the Church. Let us be careful not to generate in Weil, fascinated, the type of idolatry that she denounced in all its forms.
