Simone Weil’s Desire

The desire
by Simone Weil

Continuing the work undertaken with the book Friendship and Love, this book is composed of fragments on desire taken from the Notebooks that Simone Weil

Continuing the work undertaken with the book Friendship and Love, this book is composed of fragments on desire taken from the Notebooks that Simone Weil wrote from 1934 until months before her death.

For Simone Weil, desire is inherently contradictory. On the one hand, it is the impetus that leads us to undertake any action, but on the other, the end of all inclination. This is because desire itself, as the thinker emphasizes, is both a lock and a key, an open door to the incessant search for life and at the same time the certainty that what we have lived never fully satisfies us.

In these fragments, desire also appears, linked to other key words for Simone Weil, such as love, freedom, thought, slavery or misfortune, drawing as always a composition of reflections that help us understand the meaning of life and question all those distorted visions of the great human values.

Thinker, mystic, political activist and writer, the life of Simone Weil (Paris, 1909-Ashford, 1943) is difficult to classify. After studying philosophy and classical literature, she worked as a teacher (she obtained the highest grade, above Simone de Beauvoir) and very soon began to develop an essayistic career that includes books and pamphlets such as “Reflections on the Causes of Freedom and Social Oppression”, “On Science”, “Letter to a Religious” or “Taking Roots”.