Weil combined rigorous philosophical analysis with radical political engagement - taking a year's leave from teaching to labor in Renault and Alsthom factories so as to understand industrial oppression from the inside - and, from the late 1930s, a mystical Christian Platonism developed outside institutional baptism. Her mature work articulates concepts such as "attention," "affliction" (malheur), "decreation," and the countervailing pull of "gravity and grace," and offers a sustained critique of the totalizing claims of both Marxist "scientific" politics and totalitarian state power.
Intellectual setting
Weil worked amid interwar and wartime France, teaching philosophy in provincial lycées while engaged in trade-union and revolutionary syndicalist politics; her 1934-35 factory year, her brief 1936 service with an anarchist militia unit in the Spanish Civil War, and a series of mystical experiences beginning in 1938 (notably at Solesmes and Assisi) shaped her turn toward the religious and political writings of her final years. She died in England in 1943 while working for the Free French, having restricted her food intake in solidarity with occupied France.
Key ideas
Attention as the substance of ethics and prayer
Weil argued that genuine attention - a receptive, patient, self-emptying waiting rather than effortful will - is both the essence of prayer and the root of true compassion and intellectual work, an idea developed most fully in "Waiting for God" and her essay on the right use of school studies.
Affliction (malheur) and decreation
She distinguished affliction from ordinary suffering, defining it as a crushing of body, soul, and social standing together, and argued that rightly attended to, affliction can become the occasion for "decreation" - the voluntary renunciation of the self's claim to existence in favor of ultimate reality.
Legacy
Most of her major works - "Gravity and Grace," "Waiting for God," and "The Need for Roots" - were compiled and published posthumously, above all through the efforts of Gustave Thibon and Albert Camus, who championed her writing at Gallimard. She has influenced Christian existentialism, political theology, and social criticism, and has been cited as a formative influence by figures ranging from Camus and T. S. Eliot to later liberation theologians and political philosophers.