Venice Saved

Simone Weil, Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, Philip Wilson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350043923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Towards the end of her life, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43) was working on a tragedy, Venice Saved. Appearing here in English for the first time, this play explores the realisation of Weil's own thoughts on tragedy. A figure of affliction, a central theme in Weil's religious metaphysics, the central character offers a unique insight into Weil's broader philosophical interest in truth and justice, and provides a fresh perspective on the wider conception of tragedy itself. The play depicts the plot by a group of Spanish mercenaries to sack Venice in 1618 and how it fails when one conspirator, Jaffier, betrays them to the Venetian authorities, because he feels compassion for the city's beauty. The edition includes notes on the play by the translators as well as introductory material on: the life of Weil; the genesis and purport of the play; Weil and the tragic; the issues raised by translating Venice Saved. With additional suggestions for further reading, the volume opens up an area of interest and research: the literary Weil.

1

Simone Weil: An Inhabited Philosophy

Sarah Bakewell calls Weil’s life a ‘profound and challenging application of Iris Murdoch’s notion that a philosophy can be “inhabited”’ (2016: 199). In this introductory chapter, we explore aspects of this inhabited philosophy in order to read Simone Weil’s Venice Saved in its history. Weil was adamant that it was her thought that mattered. She wrote to Joseph-Marie Perrin that she did not want people to take an interest in her life but to look at her ideas and decide whether they were true or not (Pétrement 1976: vii). However, even if Simone Pétrement is right to argue that we can never explain whether a thinker’s work is true by looking at his or her life (Pétrement 1976: vii), knowledge of historical context places us in a better position to understand her work. Writing on George Herbert, for example, John Drury asserts that the ‘circumstances of a poet’s life and times are the soil in which the work is rooted – not just the outward and material circumstances but also, and still more, the inward patterns of thought and feeling prevailing in the poet’s world’ (2014: xvi). We should read philosophers in history. No matter how sublime the metaphysics of Martin Heidegger is, for example, no matter how astute his observations on the natural world or on translation are, his active involvement with Nazism makes some people hesitate about what he wrote. Many readers, on the other hand, find an appeal in Ludwig Wittgenstein that ‘might be said to be based on the way philosophical truth comes together with a certain conception of existential meaning, indeed a certain way of life’ (Critchley 2001: 11; cf. Hadot 1995). Something similar is true of Weil, a woman whose commitment to truth took her into school teaching, political activism, factory work, the Spanish Civil War and intellectual labour for the Free French government in exile in London. For her, philosophy was not a matter of solving metaphysical problems in academic papers, but a lived reality.

Weil began to write Venice Saved in 1940, the year in which France fell to German forces. She based it on a historical fiction published in 1674 by the Abbé de Saint-Réal (César Vichard), which is also the source for Thomas Otway’s highly successful 1682 tragedy Venice Preserv’d (1976). Weil’s play is incomplete, though she wrote comments about it and sketched out prose ideas for the unwritten scenes. As Richard Rees comments, ‘The completed parts of the text, read in conjunction with the author’s numerous notes and memoranda, which are published as a preface, compose a whole which can be read and understood almost as if it were a finished work’ (1958: 191). The project was important to Weil. In a letter of 1937 she had asked why she could not have the ‘n existences’ she needed, in order to devote one of them to the theatre (SL 91). She frequently mentioned the play to friends, showed them work in progress, made various drafts and at the end of her life asked for her notes together with a copy of the play to be sent to her in London. Only her death in 1943 prevented her from completing it.

No claim is being made here that Venice Saved is a work of literary genius. Its main interest lies in the fact that an important and much researched philosophical genius should have written a tragedy. What can this tell us about Weil? And what themes in the tragedy are of philosophical value? The play itself, however, is by no means without merits, as shown by Serena Nono’s recent film (2013). We believe that it is time to publish an English translation, given the continued popular and scholarly interest in Weil, because this is a text that presents both the political and metaphysical views that Weil had been working out towards the end of her life (see Fiori 1989: 187).

Venice Saved is a play, a dramatic poem, a work of literature. It presents a Spanish conspiracy in 1618 to overthrow Venice and subjugate its people. The conspiracy fails because Jaffier, one of the conspirators’ leaders, is affected by pity for the beauty of Venice and betrays the plans to the Council of Ten, on the assurance that his friends’ lives will be spared. The city is saved but the promise to Jaffier is not honoured. A broken man, he finally joins what is left of the conspiracy in order to die fighting. The play thus can be read as a literary study of the nature of force, affliction, attention and friendship, informed by philosophical reflection.

The French literary canon contains many works by philosophers. Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Denis Diderot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire have all produced novels and plays that are read and studied today. The literary is in any case a blurred concept. A great deal of philosophical writing has literary merit, and a great deal of literary writing offers profound philosophical insights. Plato’s philosophical dialogue The Symposium involves a carefully constructed story and includes as many literary features as any novel; Tolstoy’s historical novel War and Peace raises profound philosophical issues about history and the human condition. Narrative is, after all, an important aspect of being human; we respond to ideas when they are found in stories, whether about a dinner party in Athens, Napoleon’s attack on Russia or a failed conspiracy in Venice. Jean Boase-Beier argues that ‘poems are not separate from either ways of thinking or ways of feeling: they are those ways of thinking and feeling poeticized’ (2015: 6). Venice Saved thus both illustrates the thought of Weil and shows it in a different light. Just as readers and scholars turn to the novels and plays of Sartre in order to investigate his philosophy, so Venice Saved can serve as a way in to Weil’s thought, especially because we have privileged access to the process of writing because of her remarks and sketches for the unwritten scenes.

Weil is also a significant philosophical figure because she is a woman in a male-dominated field. In the early twenty-first century, when the underrepresentation of women in both canonical and contemporary philosophy is under critical investigation (see Hutchison and Jenkins 2013), it is clearly important to make work by women philosophers available to as many readers as possible. She has even been viewed as a feminist icon (Plant 2007: xiv), and Gabriella Fiori argues that it is impossible to separate the fact that she was a genius from the fact that she was a woman (1989: 309 ff.). There are, however, problems with seeing her as an icon. She never engaged with the issues that dominate the feminist work of de Beauvoir, for example, and in Weil’s writings there is a general lack of intellectual interest on the situation of women. Again, her Platonism means that there she is more interested in the world of the spirit than in embodiment, which places her in opposition to many feminist thinkers, including Christian feminist thinkers (cf. Clack 2015). The main female character in Venise Sauvée, Violetta, is flat and uninteresting, functioning very obviously as a cipher for the beauty of Venice. By contrast, the courtesan is portrayed in greater depth. We hear her tell of why she has turned to prostitution and see her lively interactions with the mercenaries. (Weil was herself interested in the plight of prostitutes. In 1937, she visited a brothel disguised as a young man in order to see what went on but was quickly discovered and chased out.)

To study Weil’s work is to encounter a philosopher in the French tradition. She matches the five characteristics of French thought sketched by Sudhir Hazareesingh (2015: 17): her work is historical, looking to the past for legitimation; it is fixated with the nation and the collective self; it shows an extraordinary intensity with respect to ideas, which not only matter but are worth dying for; it shows a need to communicate to a wider public; there is a constant interplay between order and the imagination. We can discern in particular an engagement with the imagination in Venice Saved, especially if we pay attention to the paratextual material.

At the Lycée Henri VI in Paris, which she entered aged sixteen, Weil showed promise in philosophy and was taught by the celebrated philosopher Émile Chartier (known as Alain), who exercised a profound influence on her thinking. Weil adopted his method of philosophy, which was based on the close reading of primary texts. (What frequently strikes the reader of Weil is the breadth of both her writing and reading. She produced a large corpus in a short life, drawing extensively on classical and modern philosophy, world literature and religious writings.) Alain also introduced her to Plato, who would be the major philosophical influence on her thought, and impressed on her the need to write with clarity. She progressed to the elite École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1931 with a degree in philosophy. Her thesis was on science and perception in Descartes.

Her Platonism and stress on the world of the spirit can be linked to her ascetic lifestyle. She was always reluctant to seek comfort in a world where others were in pain, and would precipitate her own death by refusing to eat properly in solidarity with the people of occupied France, which meant that Venice Saved remained unfinished. She lived through the First World War, in which her father served as an army surgeon, and was aware of the suffering caused by the conflict, giving up sugar in solidarity with the troops. From 1930 she suffered from severe headaches that would frequently disable her, and that showed her the meaning of ‘affliction’, a major theme in her later thought and in Venice Saved, where Jaffier becomes an ‘afflicted man’ after he has betrayed the plot. Her asceticism was not, however, without human traits: she enjoyed activities such as skiing and swimming, loved to travel, showed great kindness to friends – an important issue in the play – and (as befits a French philosopher of that era) was a heavy smoker. Weil was also profoundly attached to literature, music and art, and was a fan of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. This human side can be discerned in Venice Saved, which is based on wide reading and which portrays the beauty of a city, written by somebody with a keen awareness of what the world can offer, as well as of the affliction that arises when force is resisted. Violetta’s lyrical evocation of Venice – the ‘city of stone and water’ – that ends the play is an example of this awareness.

For Weil, philosophy could never be purely academic but demanded political involvement. When she worked between 1931 and 1934 in schools as a teacher of philosophy and literature, she continued her student political activism, leading the unemployed in their struggles against injustice in Le Puy, for example. Her political views were always of the left, but she was never a member of the Communist Party, probably due to her distrust of organizations. She even argued that political parties should be abolished (see APP). In 1932, she visited Germany to investigate Nazism and foresaw what the rise to power of Hitler would mean, fearing that the left was too disunited to combat it. She published some of her political reflections (for small readerships) at this time and frequently became involved in controversy because she had the courage to go against party lines. Fiori calls her a political ‘heretic’ (1989: 84 ff.). She was aware of the injustices of Stalin’s Russia and wrote against them with insight, arguing that the Russian Revolution had failed the proletariat and had instituted the tyranny of bureaucracy. For her, problems of force were perennial, which meant that all revolutionary theories would fail to produce a better world, just as the imposition of force on Venice will lead to murder and rape and the destruction of beauty, even though the conspirators speak at length of the Christian Europe under Spanish hegemony that they claim as their guiding vision.

Weil met and argued with Leon Trotsky, who called her a reactionary with doubts about everything and asked if she had joined the Salvation Army. Trotsky was wrong. Weil was both a woman of ideas and a woman of action. She was never content merely to theorize about political questions but felt the need to get involved in events. She was, revealingly, an admirer of the intellectual soldier T. E. Lawrence, author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whom she called an ‘authentic hero’ (SL 93). She devised a plan for women (including herself) to serve on the front line as nurses (SL 145–53), and when working for the Free French in London she demanded to be sent to occupied France as a Resistance operative. This need to match conviction with action led her to undertake work in factories in 1934–5 and then to participate in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. She is a world away from the sort of intellectual who never encounters the workers or the victims for whom she claims to speak. Factory work broke her health as she spent long hours on monotonous and dehumanizing machine work, trying when possible to educate her fellow operators and writing up her thoughts. For her it was necessary to have what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls ‘skin in the game’; her year in factories meant that ‘the working class could be something other than an abstract construct for her’ (Taleb 2018: 184). The need to have skin in the game also meant that the pacifist Weil felt that she had to take up arms with the Republicans against Franco’s fascist forces in Spain. Similarly, Jaffier must act when he realizes what will happen to the beauty of Venice if the conspiracy succeeds, even though his action means betraying both his ambition and his friends, including his very best friend, his beloved Pierre, thus bringing about his own moral and physical destruction. Weil saw little action in Spain because she stepped into a pot of boiling fat and had to be invalided home, but the Spanish experience gave her first-hand acquaintance with war and its horrors, which is an important theme in her play. No matter how grandiose the conspirators’ plans for forming a new colony are, the conquest of Venice would lead to terrible human suffering. Weil had a particular horror of sexual violence and it is significant how she foregrounds this aspect of warfare at key points of the tragedy, as the mercenaries describe in horrible detail what they will do to the women of Venice once they have taken power. She wrote in 1938 to the Catholic right-wing novelist Georges Bernanos, describing the atrocities she had heard of in the Spanish Civil War, such as the young nationalist ‘hero’ who refused to renounce his fascism and was summarily executed. She argued that the issue here is the attitude taken towards ‘murder’ (SL 105–9). Jaffier must similarly acknowledge that it is murder that awaits Venice, not the ruthlessness that is necessary to ensure a glorious political takeover. He must therefore betray his principles in the face of reality. Weil had similarly renounced pacifism totally by 1939 in recognition of the threat posed by Hitler, and we will discuss in Chapter 2 how the conspiracy against Venice as depicted by Weil can be read against the military expansion of the Third Reich, which had caused her to flee her homeland, aware of the invaders’ attitude to Jews.

Weil was born to a non-religious Jewish family and her outlook throughout her formative years was secular. Today, however, she is studied and read by many people for the Christian writings that dominate her later output. A major change in Weil’s world view had taken place in the 1930s, brought about by three encounters with Catholicism. In 1935, she visited a Portuguese fishing village where she was profoundly moved by a Catholic festival, becoming convinced that Christianity was the religion of slaves, a category with which she had come to identify after her work in industry. Then in 1937 she visited Assisi, where Saint Francis had carried out his mission, and was deeply impres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Translators’ Biographies
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Simone Weil: An Inhabited Philosophy
• Chapter 2 The Genesis and Purport of Venice Saved
• Chapter 3 Weil and the Tragic
• Chapter 4 On the Translation
• Venice Saved: Tragedy in Three Acts by Simone Weil
• Notes
• Translators’ Notes
• Bibliography
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright