Valenza politica dell'impersonale. Una lettura di Simone Weil

This work aims to demonstrate how the concept of the impersonal in Simone Weil’s thought appears in her mature works, beginning with her Marseilles output and becoming more clearly defined in her London writings. This concept is one which ranges across the metaphysical, philosophical and existential coordinates of Simone Weil’s whole path of study, so much so that it can be interpreted as an après-coup which, once it has been got into focus, re-signifies her whole work. The particular way this concept emerges relates to the reflections which arose after a mystic experience; this always remained a private event in her life but one which proved a turning point for her thought. The concept of impersonal in the present essay is considered in terms of its effects on Simone Weil’s political beliefs; her political thought gave it a central role in order to be able to conceive political feeling in such a way as to remove it both from the collective and from individualism. The crucial text for this study is La Personne et le sacré, written in London, coupled with L’énracinement. The impersonal, understood as what cannot be reduced to the individual person, allows her to open up a field of investigation comprising institutions and the law and their inability to combat the upwards surge of the mass societies and totalitarian regimes being born in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties in Europe. This led to a careful yet passionate study of what constituted acceptable institutions, ones which would not alienate all that is sacred in individuality. These positions of Simone Weil’s are placed in the context of the debate raging in her time, with particular focus on Georges Bataille’s standpoints but also examining other authors who took similar concepts to that of the impersonal and on them based their ideas for a different kind of political co-existence. At the same time, we leave room to discuss a conflict of interpretation of Weil’s thought which has significant effects on how we should understand the political importance of the impersonal. This conflict is between the monist interpretation of her thought and a dualistic interpretation of it, which would have the negative effect of objectifying the concept of the impersonal, giving it ontological weight and using it to counter other forces, while the monist interpretation of her thought allows us to take the impersonal as what makes it possible to have a broader political movement, one not confined to simple opposition.