Porn Work and Late Capitalism

 

“Every porn scene is a record of people at work,” begins Heather Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, a deeply researched book examining the nuances of labor within the adult industry. This declaration echoes the familiar rallying cry that “sex work is work,” but Berg immediately complicates it. “Sometimes it is also something else,” she adds. “Again and again, porn workers told me that they left straight (non-sex-work) jobs for porn because they ‘hated working,’” she explains. It was an escape from the nine-to-five grind. Then again, many porn workers also told her that it was “a job,” “a gig,” one with all the potentials for monotony, as well as exploitation, that come with any job or gig.

 
In her interviews with 81 performers, managers, and crew members across genres—from mainstream to amateur, and in gay, straight, queer, and feminist productions—she found reports of enjoyment and hatred, “pleasure and tedium.” These tensions are familiar to work in general, because the adult industry “is not exceptional,” argues Berg.
 
That said, porn is exceptional for being steeped in societal shame and taboo. It bucks the convention that sex should be “private and free,” as Berg puts it. Porn also appears to fail to conform to dated office-job cliches of staid cubicle farms and sober TPS reports. But, in fact, Berg shows how the experiences of porn workers are revealing of a broader “moment in late capitalism.” Workers of all sorts are “called to ‘do what you love.’” Authenticity “is a work requirement and one that can serve to extract more from workers, for less.” The many tensions in porn work fundamentally reflect the “deep contradictions at the core of (late) capitalism,” she argues. Workers flee the constraints of traditional jobs only to “find precarity on the other side.” People seek pleasure in work, which both makes it more “livable but also gets us to do more of it.”
 
Porn workers have long faced the realities that are now considered indicative of a new economy in which “intimate life is increasingly brought to the market; individual workers, rather than employers or the state, assume the economic and health risks of doing business; and a hypermobile gig economy is eclipsing more stable ways of working.” Having lived for decades in this “new” reality, porn workers have “found ways to hack and reshape its conditions for as long,” she writes. This includes everything from mutual aid for out-of-work performers to whisper networks of insider information around everything from unscrupulous talent agents to the potential side-effects of herbs used for erectile dysfunction. Berg also points to organizing efforts, like the recent formation of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, which seeks to address industry racism.
 
Berg has a sober view of the limitations of “hacking” and “reshaping” within capitalism. These efforts are “not always transformative—sometimes intervening means ascending hierarchies rather than dismantling them,” she writes. Many of these “strategies chip away at the status quo, even as they sometimes also maintain it.” Berg argues for the importance of acknowledging sex work as work, and improving the conditions of that work as a “politics for the meantime,” while also crucially and radically imagining a post-work reality. The epilogue of the book is titled, simply: “Fuck Jobs.” The phrase was taken from an interview with performer Conner Habib who said, “I don’t like the idea of jobs. The most obscene thing is ‘working for a living.’”
 
Jezebel spoke with Berg by phone about the nexus of labor and pleasure, and what porn reveals about the future of work.
 
JEZEBEL: You write of an interesting tension between the need to recognize sex work as work and many of your interviewees expressing that they chose porn because they “hated working.” Can you explain that seeming contradiction?
 
Heather Berg: This tension can’t really be resolved. What became really important for me in the book was to frame the reality that porn work not only is work but also feels like work, often in its tediums and hierarchies and forms of exploitation. In all of that, it is a job like other jobs.
It’s also true that it is absolutely a way to refuse other, and worse, straight jobs. That is a tension that can’t and shouldn’t be resolved. It became really important for me to frame that tension not as a miscalculation on workers’ parts, but instead as struggle. It’s this thing that so many workers in sex industries and outside of them are grasping at—the hope of doing something that feels more autonomous, that feels more pleasurable. There are these moments in porn where that delivers and other moments where it feels very much like the kind of retail, food service, and office work that people leave behind.
 
J : Your book is full of these tensions. One of them is the subject of authenticity, which can be both an extractive demand and a sustaining part of porn work. Can you explain what you found there?
 
HB : On the one hand, as various labor scholars have been writing for the last twenty years or so, we’re in this moment in which more and more workers are expected to do their jobs not because they need money but because they love them, because they feel like a vocation. For you and I, in journalism and academia, we have a much longer history of that, and there are all sorts of workers for whom that’s not new, that’s not a product of neoliberalism. But that’s always been the case for various forms of service work, domestic labor, teaching, and certainly for unpaid care work in the home. Those expectations around the affect that you bring to work are being democratized where all workers are expected to perform authenticity.
 
That’s more intense sometimes in sex industries because the weight is so far in the direction of disproving anti-sex worker ideas that people only do sexual labor because they desperately need the money, and also disproving the idea that the sex that happens on-set or for in-person work with a client is devoid of any kind of human connection. One response to that, particularly among feminists and queer pornographers, has been to really highlight the authenticity at work in their scenes and also to demand that performance of performers. It’s a PR strategy, but it’s also a labor market strategy, because performing authenticity makes it harder to ask about pay, it makes it harder to say you need to go home at the end of the day. That can create really significant burdens for workers. In the parts of the industry in which authenticity is most prized and also most celebrated by folks on the outside, pay tends to be lowest. That’s a classic dynamic—anyone who has worked for nonprofits or independent bookstores knows what that feels like.
 
On the other hand, authenticity sometimes matters to workers, which is why so many of us come to these industries in the first place. For autonomy and also for a sense that you can bring some part of yourself to the job, that the job doesn’t feel alienating in the classic sense. I want to take that seriously too. These glimpses of connection between costars and pleasure on the job, they’re not just disciplining, they don’t just get more work out of people but they can also be a foundation for organizing and community building. On the individual level these moments of pleasure can make the workday less bad for people and that matters. It’s both a thing that gets them to work more and something that lets us leave a little bit less of ourselves at work.
 
J : In the book, you hit at the idea that for viewers the demand for authenticity might arise from a discomfort with sex work, with commercialized sex. And that this wish might arise from a place of shame.
 

HB : Absolutely. Anti-porn feminists have engineered that shame and consumers absorb it in all sorts of ways, the idea that having sex for money is bad and that paying people to have sex for money is maybe even worse. Management’s response to that is to offer up to consumers products that make them feel ethically safe. There’s this unholy collaboration between anti-porn feminists and managers, who agree that money is a bad reason to have sex and who together coordinate, without ever talking to each other, to in some ways compel workers to pretend to work for some other reason.
 
On fan chat boards you can see all sorts of discussion around people who are “dead in the eyes” or don’t seem to be into it, or who at conventions don’t seem to really like their fans. That’s primarily mainstream fans who are demanding a ton of unpaid labor from performers, either chatting with them on OnlyFans or Twitter. On the other hand, you have self-identified queer and feminist consumers who seek out this content, which in some ways does have better working conditions, but in others is much like buying fair trade coffee. It’s more for the consumer’s ego maintenance than anything.
 
J : Similarly, how does pleasure play into work in the porn context?
 
HB : Often the narrative on the part of labor scholarship is that anytime we feel pleasure at work—whether it’s the Google slide or Casual Fridays, these kinds of cheap gestures toward worker pleasure—it’s only a transparent effort to try to get people to work more. Sometimes that’s true. Anyone who has been in a workplace like that knows how thin it can feel. At the same time, again, I don’t view any of these processes as only top-down, as only management figuring out better ways to exploit workers and workers passively accepting that.
 
The counter to that, which exists not in contradiction but alongside it, is that pleasure can make not just work but also life more livable. That matters for people. That certainly can get folks to work more for less, but there is something about life under late-capitalism that is profoundly pleasureless and un-erotic, and that expects workers to grind themselves into dust. In that context there can be something really resistive about claiming pleasure in your work day.

 
J : You write about the blurred line in porn, increasingly, between life and work.
 
HB : Another tension, and the book is full of them, is that folks often come to porn work with the promise of more money and fewer hours, a job that pays in five or six hours what they used to make in a week. That’s really crucial for folks dealing with disability or chronic illness, who have caretaking responsibilities, who are artists who need time to pursue other things, and also, I always want to add, just for people who want to work less who don’t necessarily have some lofty reason but want more time for the rest of their life. Sometimes porn delivers that, but it does so, like a lot of creative work and gig work, at the cost of any boundary between your job and your life. That offers some real benefits to people insofar as much of the work can be done at home. As people have found during the pandemic, there’s some pleasure in that for some people. All of that’s true and at the same time it can be really hard never to be able to clock out. Workers talked about how they navigated these demands where, unless you have really strict boundaries around your time, you’re never really on vacation.
 
You’re always uploading content to your OnlyFans or updating your subscription site or quoting fans on social media. People have a lot of smart hacks around that, you can automate a lot, but it can feel difficult to have any sense of separation. But that’s not unique to porn, that’s something all sorts of freelancers identify. I’m not framing that only as something that takes more from people, there are real benefits. It’s not just a neoliberal managerial perspective to say that no one wants to go into an office—that’s actually true for people and I don’t think we should pretend it’s not.
 
J : What are some of the issues with looking toward the state for support and protection?
 
HB : The primary consideration here is that employment law is set up to force a choice upon workers in a really artificial way born out of a very brutal compromise between industrial labor organizers and capital during the New Deal era. It forced this choice between autonomy and some semblance of protection. That is the origin of the distinction between independent contractors and employees and the longstanding rule that it’s only people designated as employees who are nominally protected at work. In order to get access to that protection, whether it’s around anti-discrimination law or occupational health or protections from wage theft or access to social security, you have to give up control over your labor, which is why some people have always refused that.
 
At the same time, it’s also true that even for people designated as employees, those protections are slimmer and slimmer by the day and they’ve been so eroded under neoliberalism. Even at their height, they were only designed to benefit the white male industrial worker, so they always left out domestic workers, migrant workers, racialized workers, gendered workers, and sex workers and other folks in the informal economy. You give up a lot in name in not working under a boss, but as mainstream workers have learned over the course of the pandemic, plenty of formal employers can put you at risk with no liability, can lower your pay with no responsibilities to you. The risks of relying entirely on state protection are two fold. One, that it forces this choice and, two, the crumbs you’re given on the other side are so paltry.

 
J : What is it about porn work itself that adds an additional challenging dimension to reliance on the state?
 
HB :  Porn workers, like other sex workers, have had this longstanding antagonistic relationship to the state because the state regards sex workers primarily as unruly bodies to be controlled rather than workers who need workplace protection. There’s this tricky dynamic where workers often ally with management to resist state interference in ways that would look very strange to a labor organizer outside sex industries. The reality is many workers make this calculation that they would rather have no state intervention than state intervention that treats them solely as vectors of disease.
 
You can see that in the state’s incredibly single-minded focus on STI transmission over and above all of workers’ mundane health concerns—but also concerns around discrimination and wage theft—that, if you ask workers, they’re much more concerned with. Legislators are just obsessed with the idea of rampant HIV transmission on porn sets, for example. Workers are right that the state’s interventions there will be violent ones rather than pro-worker ones. On the other hand, it does create this dynamic that looks like libertarianism from the outside, but I don’t think is, in which you have workers with no ability to appeal to state response when their legal rights are violated.
 
So much state policy regarding porn work has actively made conditions worse. One example of that is FOSTA-SESTA, which have not only materially made it harder for workers to work, but also harder to work independently without giving some of their pay to management, whether platforms or individuals. It’s also made it harder to organize.
 
J : Absent state assistance, you write about collective and individual struggles in porn work. What approaches have been most effective?
 
HB : For a time, porn workers had really tight networks of mutual care and community and had figured out ways to take care of each other when the state and employers had failed to do so. That looks like information sharing, daily acts of mutual aid, teaching each other how to do the work in ways that are less extractive, whether that be tips for performing in ways that protect your body or letting people know how to get out of work with a bad agent.
 
Now, with the overwhelming transition to digital, some of the in-person network has dispersed, but much of that has moved online. In the early days of the pandemic, so many people were figuring out how to make ends meet and sites like OnlyFans were oversaturated. Even then, porn workers were sharing information with either sex workers who had primarily done in-person work before or folks who were newly out of work in their straight jobs and trying to make some money on digital sex work hustles. Seasoned sex workers were sharing information on how to do it safely, how to make money. It was such generosity, even amidst the labor market compression and scarcity, in ways I don’t think you would find in many jobs.
 
J : Recently, we’ve seen the resurgence of an anti-porn movement targeting tube sites. What do you make of this in the “porn work” context?
 
HB : Part of the problem is that anti-porn campaigners, even those who say they’re trying to protect workers, don’t talk to them. They have not just inaccurate but also outdated ideas about how any of this works. If anti-porn campaigners had been paying attention fifteen years ago when workers were starting to organize against tube sites, there might have been some possibility of making themselves useful, if what they actually wanted to do was make it harder for tube sites to steal content and allow fans to consume sex workers’ labor without paying them. But we’re not there and, of course, that’s never been their genuine aim.
 
In this moment, tube sites are so ubiquitous and sex workers are so crafty, they have spent years cultivating strategies that make tube sites work for them. Now, the primary effect of anti-porn intervention into tube sites specifically is to shut down all of those hacks that workers have already devised. That’s one issue, the other is the implications this has for legal precedent. Historically, struggles over free sexual speech have often focused on studios and traditional managers, but as more and more sex workers have access to class mobility within the industry through producing their own content, then those assaults on sexual speech have a direct impact not on some big studio head, but on sex workers’ own ability to make a living.
 
J : What lessons can be drawn from porn workers’ navigation of these tricky tensions around work, life, authenticity, and pleasure?
 
HB : First, porn workers and sex workers more broadly have already been living in the conditions that are just now hitting other kinds of workers in straight industries. The kinds of trends that labor scholars and activists are observing in other fields as a recent crisis have been par for the course for sex workers since the inception of the work. That is, again, these blurred lines around life and work, and this total lack of state support for worker safety. It’s also blurred boundaries around class—we don’t have one tidy community of workers and another of management that can be easily organized against. Also, this double bind where we want work that feels pleasurable, but then that pleasure can be used against us.
 
All of these conditions—especially these recent concerns that civilians are just figuring out, like, “Oh, it’s a problem for Uber drivers that the state doesn’t see them as workers”—sex workers have been figuring how to survive in spite of that forever. Straight workers can learn so much from those strategies.
 
In terms of what that looks like around surviving state violence and neglect, porn workers’ strategies around mutual aid, information sharing, and subtle ways of intervening in their conditions that don’t rely on the protection or permission of the state are so inspiring. My two cents are that other gig workers would be served in not asking for recognition and permission, and taking what they want in less direct ways. In terms of navigating the blurry boundaries between life and work, it’s less that porn workers have figured out some secret, because it’s something folks talk about struggling with all the time, and more that they just remind us that life isn’t better when you have that clear boundary, necessarily. So many people leave jobs that they did clock into, that weren’t at home, that had nothing to do with their own desires, and those jobs were awful too. The main lesson is that work sucks and nobody wants to have a boss.
 
This economy is set up to punish people who try to escape that. You can’t have total autonomy and also security under capitalism. That’s not a porn problem that’s a capitalism problem. Porn workers reveal the impossibility of that and are also really smart about how to survive in the meantime.
 
'Pleasure and Tedium': What Porn Reveals About the Future of Work. By Tracy Clark-Flory.  Jezebel, June 10, 2021.

Porn Work, Gig Economy, and the Politics of New Labor. Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. She is the author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism and assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Labor Solidarity Project, April 16, 2021. 

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Heather Berg’s new book, Porn Work, takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and anti-work theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks at what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.
 Porn Work : Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism . Connor Habib, Cassandra Troyan, moses moon, Heather Berg,  moderator is Kathi Weeks

Red May TV , May 16, 2021. 

Hey, everyone, Jessie here! As a sex worker and founder and managing editor of Peepshow Media (a multimedia online magazine featuring news and stories from the sex industry), one of the most common questions I see around the discussion of porn is: How can I consume porn ethically?
If you have been paying attention to what has been happening in the porn industry — even a little bit — you have probably noticed that being a porn performer isn’t without its complications.
 
While there are a handful of high-profile porn stars who seem to live a life of excitement and luxury, most performers are making more moderate incomes, and many are struggling just to make it in an industry that has become oversaturated by the rise of independent content creation platforms like OnlyFans. Furthermore, the pandemic has pushed in-person sex workers — like escorts and strippers — as well as nonprofessionals, to online sex work.
 
In addition to the oversaturation of the porn market, there have been many public allegations of on-set assault that have pushed performers to call for a #metoo moment within the industry, not to mention a global pandemic that has halted porn production and made it unsafe for performers to collaborate.
 
And if that wasn’t bad enough, banking discrimination has meant that many porn performers have had trouble accessing their money and in many cases, have had their accounts shut down. And none of this even takes into account the considerable social stigma that porn performers regularly face, including anti-pornography feminism that espouses the inherent harm of all forms of sex work, including pornography.
 
And yet, porn performers provide a valuable service that I would venture to guess most of the readers of this article have at some time indulged in. A thoughtful consumer who wants to make sure not to contribute to any of these harms probably asks themselves a seemingly simple question: How the hell do I ethically consume porn? To dive into this, I turned to three experts: Dr. Heather Berg and porn performers Lotus Lain and Lena Paul.

Berg, assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the book Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, points out that when the question is aimed at the performers themselves, it creates a lot of unpaid work for performers (thus being antithetical to the aim). She says, “There is a way that the hope to consume ethically ends up requiring a lot more labor of performers to convince consumers that they are doing the right thing.”

 
Lain, an adult performer and activist within the adult industry says that it is complicated, in part, because ethics are subjective: “My feelings are, everyone has a different set of ethics.”
 
What’s more, consumption — in porn or any other industry — is complicated. “I wish that there was one convenient answer to this question,” says porn star Paul. “It is such a simple question, but the more we unpack it, the more complicated it becomes.
 
While there is no simple answer to this question, here are a few things to consider when you think about consuming porn more ethically in the future:
 
Unfortunately, porn is not ethical just because it is branded so or looks like it was ethically produced.
 
In her interviews of porn performers for her book, Berg says that they quite often expressed their frustration with working for production companies that were branded ethical. “Performers had a lot of critiques of feminist and queer porn,” she says. “It often requires extra and unpaid work to communicate ethics to consumers.”
 
This often includes pre- or post-interviews wherein performers express their pleasure in the scene or demands other signaling that is ultimately not for the benefit of the performers. The purpose is to make consumers feel better about their consumption. “The companies want aesthetic and postproduction add-ons to convey to the customers that it is ethically safe.”
 
Lain points out that scenes with the sort of signaling that make the consumers feel good because they either are soft-core or make an aesthetic show of consent and ethics don’t necessarily feel that way to the performers themselves. She says that even though the scene may feel good to watch, “the actors could have been underpaid, the location could have been dangerous, etc.”
 
In looking for studio porn, both Lain and Paul suggest that consuming your favorite star’s performances alone won’t give you insight into how they feel. After all, they are performers.
 
Instead, customers can do their research by following performers online and paying attention to how they talk about their work experiences. Lain suggests, “Twitter is the best way of finding out how performers feel about working for particular companies.” She asserts that looking at what people who are not currently a company’s favorite say will give you a more accurate picture. “Find out what former favorites feel about the company when they are no longer favorites,” she says.
 
Paul says that if your concern as a consumer is mitigating suffering of individual performers and you want to make sure that the performers are not being mistreated, following them and being positively engaged are also good ways to know. She says, “The biggest way to have ethical consumption is to have a degree of interaction online, be it with a studio model or independent content creator." It is important to remember, however, that contacting and interacting with your favorite performers on their work social media accounts requires labor on their part and you should be compensating them for their time — even when your interactions are not sexual in nature.
 
Another advantage of following your favorite performers on social media is that they will show you where they prefer to sell their content. Some platforms take larger cuts than others, and Berg suggests that everyone ought to be “paying attention to platforms’ own rate structures and following your favorite performers to the platforms they prefer.” Or, in other words, Berg says, “Subscribe to platforms that give performers higher cuts.”
 
Paul agrees that trying to pay the models you follow as directly as possible is best for performers. She reminds us, “As performers, we receive no royalties from studio porn.” She adds, “The odds of your money going to a model if you buy porn directly from them are orders of magnitude higher.”
 
Lain echoes Paul’s sentiments: “Obviously the most ethical way is to buy it from the performers.” She is quick to add, “Pay them if you want to see certain things. Don’t hassle them on their Instagram comments.” Many performers are more than happy to create custom content when they are being paid for it. They do not, however, appreciate being told what to do on social media by folks who aren’t paying them.
 

In terms of paying for your porn, Berg also points out that if you have seen a performer's work that you really like on one of the big tube sites, tipping them encourages them to continue to create what you like. She says, “If you are pirating, most performers have a Cash App. You can find that and pay them directly for content you’ve already seen.”
 
One last thing to remember is that not all of your porn budget needs to be spent on visual prerecorded videos. In Lain’s words: “There are many different ways to be titillated.” She suggests considering interacting with your favorite performers on pay sites like NiteFlirt and SextPanther, where you can chat, text, send pics, and create custom fantasies.
 
If you have reasons that make it impossible to pay for your porn, there are other ways you can be conscious about supporting the performers you admire. On Pornhub, for example, you can make sure you are only giving your traffic to verified users (they will have a blue check by their name) so that they get kickbacks for your view. If you enjoy webcam performances, you can positively contribute to the room by engaging the performer in conversations that help to keep the spirits up in the room and encouraging others to tip and help the model reach her goals. And you can also help to promote the work of your favorite models on social media by retweeting and sharing their promo tweets if and when applicable.
 
Not All Porn Is Ethical — Here's What You Should Know. By Jessie Sage. Buzzfeed, March 21, 2021.

“Every porn scene is a record of people at work.” So begins Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, a new book by the Washington University feminist studies scholar Heather Berg. It’s an arresting statement, at once self-evident yet also likely to confound many readers. How many people who do not make porn have thought much about the labor conditions of those who do?
 
Apparently, not many scholars. Porn scholarship, Berg writes, focuses overwhelmingly on “issues of representation and consumption,” on porn as a text rather than as a workplace. “Labor scholarship, on the other hand, has strenuously avoided critical engagement with porn and other sex work,” she continues. Thus, Berg has written a book that seeks to unite these two disparate scholarly fields. The result is a breathtaking work of scholarship — the product of 81 interviews Berg conducted with performers, managers, and crew members, the interviewees ranging in age from 21 to 70 — that challenges preconceived notions and tidy assumptions on every page.
 
Intended less as a traditional ethnography and more as an effort to “bring interviewees’ expertise to bear on porn, sex, and work,” Porn Work builds on deep theoretical engagement and nearly a decade of fieldwork. Porn as work, Berg ultimately argues, exemplifies the deep contradictions of late capitalism but also models a work landscape unlike most others. Contrary to the traditional Marxist understandings of class position, for instance, porn workers often move between various positions within the industry, from performer to director to producer and back again, often doing so rapidly and sometimes simultaneously. Porn workers have also been navigating precarious workplaces for longer than laborers in many other industries and job sectors, and thus they have long grown adept at thwarting management and exercising power in the workplace in ways that are usually ignored by outsiders committed to imagining porn workers as powerless and pitiable.
 
“Everybody gets used in one way or another,” Dominic Ace, a veteran porn publicist, tells Berg in one interview. “Whether you’re a secretary, a janitor, whatever. The difference here is it’s sex.” Perhaps Berg’s most important intervention is that she takes that last sentence seriously. In many ways, porn work is unexceptional, and that’s because porn work — like all work — is exploitative and often sucks. But the presence of sex “brings both particular vulnerabilities and resources — intensified state violence and stigma on the one hand and the potential for pleasureful refusal on the other.” Taking pleasure seriously makes it impossible to treat porn as just a job. “I get to have and give pleasure every day for my job,” the performer-activist Conner Habib explains to Berg. “Is that not in some ways a great potential to sidestep ‘I get to give and experience misery’?”
 

 
It’s striking that so many people’s perceptions of porn are a decade or two out of date; in fact, as Berg claims, “[t]he porn industry as it has been traditionally understood does not exist.” While many outsiders imagine a conventional media landscape with powerful producers and established studios and a small number of recognizable “stars,” the 2008 financial crisis, combined with the proliferation of piracy and widespread access to cheap production technology, has resulted in a “glutted labor market but one that is also open to a range of workers’ creative interventions.” For many porn workers, the 2010s meant less stability, scarcer profits, a more diffuse performer community, and greater competition for fewer gigs. However, it also meant the advent of direct-to-consumer and “interactive” content — often filmed from home and advertised for free via social media — which has disrupted managers’ power and eased entry into porn for more workers from more diverse backgrounds.
 
Berg begins by describing the “shop floor” for porn performers who work under a director and a producer. The porn workday starts with workers negotiating the terms of their labor — the details and boundaries of what they will do. (“No interviewees reported being forced to perform scenes they had initially refused,” Berg notes. It’s expensive when performers walk off set, and “with so many willing workers, there is little reason to cajole unwilling ones.”) Next comes STI test authentication, paperwork, hair and makeup, and other body preparations (for instances, douches, enemas, other medicines). Then, generally, waiting. Long days and delays are common on porn sets — a source of anxiety or anger for some performers who just want to go home, but also sometimes an opportunity for community-building and side-hustling.
 
“It need not reinforce the conservative idea of a neat distinction between porn sex and ‘real’ sex to acknowledge that most sex on set is labor intensive in ways off-set sex generally is not,” Berg writes. Performers need to convincingly manufacture sexual chemistry with a scene partner even if they’re not attracted to them; they need to avoid reaching orgasm or ejaculation too soon; they need to pause often for difficult still shots. And they need to learn how to position their bodies to reduce discomfort, chafing, and repetitive stress injuries. All of this is work, and all of it takes skill.
 
There is also the invisible labor that happens off-camera and off-set, which often destroys any boundary between work and life. Porn workers (like other gig workers) need to constantly market themselves, which nowadays means cultivating a consistent social media presence — a time-consuming proposition, and, when it involves interactions with fans, one that requires heavy emotional labor. Porn workers often spend hundreds of dollars a month and countless hours maintaining their appearances — labor that falls more heavily on “workers who fall outside the white, cis-feminine norm.” Many now engage in “satellite work,” such as erotic dance, webcamming, and escort work, which can provide vital income but is sometimes seen as lower on the “whorearchy” of sex work. Some porn workers also take on “straight work,” meaning work outside of the sex work sector, though their visibility often renders them vulnerable to harassment or firing from which they enjoy no legal protection.
 
The varying rates porn workers are paid are highly secretive, but performers are often aware of disparities in compensation. White, cisgender, and thin performers generally have an easier time finding work on high-budget studio productions that pay well; the few performers of color or trans performers who do get cast in such features often encounter lower pay and demeaning fetishization. Some non-Black performers refuse to do “interracial” scenes, or even charger higher rates for them. (Some agents, meanwhile, told Berg that “they disallow ‘interracial’ work in order to maintain what they see is a valuable fan market of racist consumers.”) Women (cis and trans) who perform in penile-vaginal or penile-anal intercourse scenes make an average of $800 to $1,000, while cis men make $300 to $600 for the same scenes (though they make $800 to $1,200 for gay scenes). Blow jobs and solo masturbation pay less. Performers in so-called “feminist” productions (supposedly produced in an equitable manner, though this is much contested) generally make flat fees, usually $200 to $600 per scene. Some lower-end director-producers told Berg they don’t need to pay male performers at all, as amateur men would jump at the chance to have free sex with a “porn star.” Of course, this sort of arrangement undercuts the labor market for those who depend on the industry for their incomes and other means of security. “Sex work tourism can be a kind of scabbing,” Berg concludes.
 
The sex itself is, predictably, the part of porn work on which most critics and scholars focus their attention. Berg does likewise, though in an innovative way, devoting an entire chapter to parsing porn workers’ feelings about “pleasure [a]s a working condition.” Sometimes porn workers find sex on set to be physically uncomfortable; others find porn sex not too rough but rather too tame, perhaps because directors want to “appeal to an imagined feminist audience.” Some porn workers withhold full effort from a scene or seek to maintain an emotional detachment from the work, but many do not — either because a lackluster performance could affect their ability to get future work or because they find genuine pleasure and authentic fulfilment in the work. Invocations of “pleasure” and “authenticity” can be a means of managerial manipulation, a way for bosses to coerce workers into doing free or informal labor. But the porn workers Berg spoke to demand that their authenticity and pleasure be taken seriously. “In sex work as elsewhere,” Berg explains, pleasure can make “work feel less like work. And authenticity claims can be a means of refusing anti-sex-worker stigma.”
 
Porn Work thrives on such ambiguities and contradictions. Many of Berg’s interviewees discussed porn as a means of real self-expression even as they critiqued the obsession outsiders have with whether porn is “authentic” or not. One performer pushed back on the notion that porn is “work” because the term connotes suffering, but in the same interview acknowledged that there was plenty of suffering in porn. It’s difficult, Berg admits, to discuss the authentic pleasure some workers find in porn while also recognizing that, for most workers, porn is “a way to make do and get by.” Porn is work, then, but it’s not merely work. Ultimately, Berg concludes, porn workers’ “refusal to resolve this tension is instructive.” Taking pleasure seriously is vital to recognizing the ways that workers struggle, win autonomy, and “take something from porn performance that exceeds what racial capitalism intends.”
 
As our rapidly warming, pandemic-ravaged society descends ever deeper into precarity and despair, many critics, scholars, activists, and artists are in the midst of a major reevaluation the ethics of work itself, and Porn Work must be understood as part of this broader trend. Berg credits many sex worker theorists for creating new ways of thinking about pleasureful subversions of capitalism; femi babylon, for instance, has urged thinkers to “move beyond ‘sex work is work’” to “‘sex work is (anti)work.’” Outside of this context, journalist Sarah Jaffe has just published a deeply reported manifesto titled Work Won’t Love You Back, while fellow reporter Anne Helen Petersen titled the epilogue her recent book about burnout “Burn It Down.” Historians like Louis Hyman have excavated the origins of the workplace as gig-ified hellscape, and anthropologists like the late David Graeber have decried the resulting rise in “bullshit jobs.” The legal scholar Daniel Markovits has recently argued that even elite white-collar workers are increasingly miserable.

 
Berg’s argument that porn work is different is persuasive, but such an argument can also be overstated. Work sucks, and workers across sectors and across borders are increasingly recognizing the need for radical change. Solidarity depends on such widespread and mutual recognition. In this context, perhaps Berg’s most significant contribution to the discourse is to highlight the creative ways that porn workers have found to resist work.
 
 
Porn workers engage in struggles for control and respect in myriad ways, which Berg details with laudable attention and care. She writes that she began her research looking for traditional forms of worker organizing, like union drives or lobbying efforts, and, though she found plenty of that, her interviewees ultimately convinced her that these do not represent their strongest means of resistance.
 
The Screen Actors Guild excluded porn workers in 1974, a policy that has remained unchanged and has been followed by pretty much all of the mainstream labor movement. And though there have been some attempts at traditional union organizing, workers told Berg that the more impactful advocacy efforts were “nontraditional forms of organizing,” such as peer education and building support systems. These have been vital as new porn workers learn to negotiate terms and deal with untrustworthy managers. (“It was not uncommon for non-sex-worker interviewees to suggest that sex workers are not terribly bright,” Berg writes, “only to later describe a situation in which sex workers had outsmarted them.”) Mutual aid networks allow porn workers to assist each other in securing housing and transitioning into straight jobs. Shortly before Porn Work went to press, for instance, organizers founded the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, which engages in a range of mutual aid work — from skill shares and virtual workshops to transferring money directly to porn workers in need.
 
Porn workers’ struggles for autonomy and respect take place in other areas, as well. For instance, many resist one-dimensional stereotypes with irreverent social media presences. The “best thing about twitter,” Vex Ashley tweeted in 2018, is that “in 1999 you could keep the dream alive your favourite porn girls were perma-horny, passive, and amenable, but now it’s unavoidable public record that we’re all basically acerbic, snarky communists who do not stand for bullshit.”
 
The rise of social media, as well as the affordability of audiovisual recording equipment, has also allowed many performers (especially those with large fan followings) to produce their own scenes. This can enable them to circumvent industry racism or niche casting, often employing other workers in the process. Many more use technology like OnlyFans to work on their own, which has rendered the entire industry less dependent on large production companies. This democratized access to the means of production has not, however, created a world with no bosses. Personalized services still frequently require a middleman; some webcam platforms take massive cuts of performers’ profits, and (as in the world of straight work) they rely on “algorithmic management.”
 
State surveillance can further limit the emancipatory potential of DIY and direct-to-consumer porn. In 2018, Congress passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) legislative package, which was pitched as a way to create legal consequences for websites that facilitate sex trafficking. The law’s sponsors had framed it as protecting sex workers, but sex workers themselves were shut out of the drafting process, their insights and objections ignored. As a result, SESTA/FOSTA have made sex workers less safe, shuttering websites through which they could screen potential clients, forcing many onto the streets, and rendering them more vulnerable to the possible violence of clients, pimps, the police, and — ironically and tragically — traffickers.
 
In the world of porn, workers’ distance from fans insulated them to some extent from the negative impacts of SESTA/FOSTA, but the laws’ “deliberately broad definition of trafficking” led numerous sites to shut out sex workers, including video conferencing and payment processing technology. “Google Drive erased performers’ video files without warning,” Berg recounts, “in some cases destroying workers’ only scene files.” As with sex work more broadly, this has led many porn workers back to conventional porn managers.
 
In the months leading up to the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, sex workers began to organize against the legislation, and in the aftermath of its passage many began providing education for workers rendered vulnerable by the laws and media training for workers to try to shift the dominant media narrative. More broadly, porn workers have long had to engage in anti-stigma activism (especially because the major producers that once spearheaded free-speech lawsuits now “have a fraction of the power and wealth they once did”). Many porn workers are forced to fight against discriminatory landlords, stigmatizing or disrespectful medical care, and even exclusion from basic banking privileges.
 
The porn workers Berg interviewed “overwhelmingly” distrusted the state to remedy these vulnerabilities, in large part because their primary interactions with the state come in the form of surveillance. Porn workers want occupational health protections, but policy-makers tend to focus monomaniacally on two areas where workers largely just want autonomy: HIV prevention protocols and mandatory condom laws. In California, many legislators fought for a ballot initiative that would have allowed private citizens to sue “producers” who violate the law by failing to use condoms during filming; according to porn workers, this would have left many performer-producers vulnerable to harassment and even given stalkers access to their personal information. In the face of such unresponsive regulators, what porn workers want, Berg argues, “is freedom from both state and employer control.”
 
This desire for freedom can be confused with run-of-the-mill libertarianism (a philosophy commonly attributed to the porn industry), but to Berg’s credit she refuses to flatten the complexity of porn workers’ critique. Their opposition is not so much to state intervention as to invasive or carceral state intervention. It is no contradiction for vulnerable workers to simultaneously reject state surveillance yet also decry state neglect. Once again, porn workers’ critique has relevance far beyond porn, or sex work more broadly. In so many sectors of work, we are well past the point at which the liberal state — or liberalism itself — could save us. Only an insistence on a radical redistribution of wealth, power, and control could allow workers to liberate themselves from bleak and broken work. And only continuous struggle will result in this radical break.
 
 

 
What might this look like? One possibility can be found in the title Berg chose for her epilogue: “Fuck Jobs.”
 
While liberals may promote reforms that would classify porn workers as “employees” and thus eligible for certain wage and health protections, Berg argues that this would “represent a backward-looking attempt to bring a few more workers into a broken category (and one that, again, some workers do not want).” Porn work does not track easily on the law’s artificial boundary between private life and public work, and, in any case, “there is no going back — the conditions that created limited security for a privileged subset of mostly white, male workers in the mid-twentieth century are gone.”
 
Instead of fighting for a less miserable system of work, Berg and many of her interviewees adopt a resolutely anti-work perspective. There is something genuinely disruptive about getting paid to exchange pleasure, Berg writes. “It is an exchange that beckons a postwork utopia in which guaranteed annual incomes replace the compulsion to work and pleasure seeking takes the place of drudgery.”
 
Berg’s three-page-long epilogue does not comprehensively lay out what precisely this utopia might look like, or how exactly we might get to it, but this was not her project. Rather, canny readers can glean from her work “vital clues about surviving this moment of profound capitalist crisis,” she writes. Excluded from legal protections and the larger labor movement, porn workers have had to be creative, to establish their own education and support systems, to buy their own means of production and employ their friends, to take pleasure seriously. Berg’s interviewees may have found traditional union organizing to be less helpful than other means of mutual aid and resistance, yet readers should not conclude from this that they should disregard unions; indeed, the future of the planet may well depend on passage of legislation like the PRO Act and the revitalization of the labor movement. Nonetheless, labor organizers and political activists should take heed of porn workers’ creativity and success in disrupting the paradigm of work as misery or monotony.
 
Porn work necessarily “reimagines porn, and work,” Berg concludes. And then, quoting performer-activist Conner Habib: “Okay, fuck jobs.”
 
Sex Work as (Anti)Work: On Heather Berg’s “Porn Work” By Scott W. Stern. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 7, 2021. 

Remembering Simone Weil: The Price and the Purpose of Philosophy

Seventy-five years ago, on August 26, the coroner at Grosvenor Sanatorium, a sprawling Victorian pile located in the town of Ashford, about 60 miles southeast of London, ended his examination of a patient who had died two days earlier. The cause of death, he wrote, was “cardiac failure due to myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis.” But the clinical assessment then gives way to what appears to be an ethical judgment: “The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”

The deceased was buried in Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford; a flat marker laid across her grave was engraved with her name and relevant dates:

               Simone Weil

               3 février 1909

               24 août 1943

Weil’s grave, its location highlighted on the cemetery map, has since become one of Ashford’s most visited tourist sites. By way of acknowledging the constant stream of visitors, a second marble slab explains that Weil had “joined the Provisional French government in London” and that her “writings have established her as one of the foremost modern philosophers.”

But one can fit only so much on a grave marker. In January, Weil arrived in London in order to work for Charles de Gaulle’s Les Français libres. Yet as was so often the case in her life, she eventually refused to belong to any club that would accept her as a member. Four months after she joined the Gaullist movement, Weil announced her resignation. She gave as her reason the fact that her superiors had repeatedly refused her request to be sent on mission to occupied France.

Such a mission, Gaullist headquarters believed, would end in Weil’s capture and death. The odd thing is that Weil didn’t disagree. She tried to persuade Maurice Schumann, an old friend who had become one of de Gaulle’s advisors, that any assignment “not requiring technical expertise but involving a high degree of hardship and danger, would suit me perfectly.” Even more improbably, Weil declared that should she be arrested, her feeble health guaranteed she would die “without giving anything away.”

But there is an even odder aspect to all of this, one that reflects the gravestone’s claim that Weil is “one of the foremost modern philosophers.” During her short life, Weil published very little. A graduate of France’s elite institution of higher learning, the École normale supèrieure, Weil worked hard at avoiding the sort of work expected of her. Though she taught in several different lycées, Weil grasped, as she told one student, that teaching kept her away from “real life.” To the dismay of school administrators — one of whom dubbed her the “Red Virgin” — she demonstrated with striking workers, participated in labor union debates, taught adult education classes, and wrote for a variety of newspapers. Like George Orwell and Albert Camus, while Weil was very much on the political left, she distrusted revolutionaries no less than she did reactionaries. Certain that a Marxist regime, even more so than a monarchist regime, would lead to totalitarian rule, Weil threw her support to anarchist and syndicalist organizations.

Even these activities, though, were not real enough. For Weil, reality was rooted in the world of manual labor. Often, a morbid romanticism seems to drive her desire to experience this world. As she told one baffled fisherman who took her on as a deckhand even though she was mostly useless, her “misfortune” was that she had never been poor. Weil made the same confession to a farmer and his wife for whom she wished to work: “What I want is to live the life of the poor, to share their work, live their troubles, eat at their table.” The couple, stunned by this request from a well-to-do Parisian bourgeoise, reluctantly invited her into their lives. Less reluctantly, they disinvited her a month later. Chief among their reasons was that Weil never stopped peppering them with questions and did not eat when they sat down to a meal, explaining that the “children in Indochina are going hungry.”

But something else — something that shrinks or skeptics cannot explain away — was at work in Weil’s pursuit of work. “So far as one has only an idea, one has nothing that’s real,” she insisted. “The great human error is to reason in place of finding out.” The task of finding out meant stepping outside the laboratory or library, the cafe or classroom. Philosophy, she reminded herself in her journal, “is exclusively an affair of action and practice.” She might have added that it is also an affair of truth, but as she told her students, truth must “always be a truth about something.” Something lived, something experienced, something pounded into one’s bones. This truth, she sensed, eluded her fellow intellectuals, even though they pretended to speak for workers. How could they wax theoretical on the alienation of workers when “they themselves have never been cogs in the machinery of factory”?

Weil’s quest to match her words with the world led her not just to fishing trawlers and farms, but also, and most famously, to factories. In late 1934, Weil took a leave of absence from teaching and spent the next year working at three different factories in Paris. It was within the walls of these deafening and dreary buildings, yoked to a machine where she was condemned to repeat the same motions countless times, that Weil made one of her most disturbing discoveries: le malheur. Best translated as affliction, this inhuman state resulted less from physical suffering than from psychological degradation. Reduced to a machine-like existence by their relentless and repetitive physical labor, harried by time clocks and hounded by foremen, the workers were quite simply unable to think at all, much less think about resistance or rebellion. This apprenticeship in alienation forced upon Weil the realization that the factory makes it “almost impossible for me to overcome the strongest temptation that this life entails: that of not thinking anymore, which is the one and only way of not suffering from it.”

But Weil was cursed by the inability to stop thinking, even in the most dire of circumstances. How could it be otherwise? If she had stopped thinking, she would have stopped being Simone Weil. Chain-smoking cigarettes, adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses, and wearing the same dress she had the day before (and would wear again the next day), Weil repeated a core conviction to her students: “If one stops oneself from thinking of all this, one makes oneself an accomplice of what is happening. One has to do something quite different: take one’s place in this system of things and do something about it.” If philosophy didn’t lead to such a conclusion, it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Come France’s defeat and occupation by the Nazis, the imperative to “do something about it” grew unbearable. In part, what Weil did was write. The last three years of her life were, at least from a literary perspective, the most productive. She wrote under a pseudonym while living in Marseille — a necessity, since the Vichy regime prohibited Jews from all white-collar professions — and continued to write when she reached New York. It was as a writer and thinker that Weil caught the attention of Les Français libres, who brought her to London in late 1942 to assist in making plans for the reestablishment of republican government and law after France’s liberation. During the few months that she spent there, Weil wrote several hundred pages, ranging from terse analyses to what is perhaps her magnum opus, L’Enracinement, or On the Need for Roots.

But for Weil, none of these works, despite their compelling and often unsettling insights, qualified as doing something about it. Writing was not enough. As Weil told Schumann, “The suffering all over the world obsesses and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties and the only way I can revive them and release myself from the obsession is by getting for myself a large share of danger and hardship.” What better way, Weil thought, to get this share of danger and hardship than as a nurse? Not the usual sort of nurse, like those treating her in Ashford and to whom she was quite kind. (The doctors, on the other hand, lived in white-knuckled terror of visits to her room.)

Instead, Weil had in mind a different vocation for nurses, one she described in painstaking detail in a series of drafts. In the title to one she wrote in English — “A plan for a group of volunteer fire-line [sic] nurses” — the spelling mistake is all too telling. The nurses’ mission was less to save the lives of wounded soldiers than to offer up their own lives. Parachuted onto the front lines, the nurses would serve by applying dressings and tying tourniquets on the injured. More important, though, the women, whose white uniforms were tantamount to the wearing of bull’s-eyes, would serve themselves up as targets for German soldiers. As Weil explained matter-of-factly, “They would need to offer their lives as a sacrifice.”

General de Gaulle possibly read no further than this line when he famously blurted: “Mais elle est folle!” Perhaps Weil was a bit mad, but as the rest of the plan reveals, there was a method to her madness. She observes, rightly, that German military successes were not just a matter of strategy and material, but also spirit and men. This was particularly the case for the SS, who were prepared “not only for risking their lives but for death.” The trick was not to copy Nazism’s brutal idolatry, Weil noted, but instead to create its opposite. Embodying compassion and solicitude, not cruelty and savagery, the nurses would be sent “wherever there is the most brutal carnage something which evokes the homes [our soldiers] have been obliged to leave.”

Not surprisingly, Weil wished to lead the first wave of nurses to be airdropped onto the battlefield, and took a first aid course in hopeful preparation for her assignment. But when her plan elicited nothing more than silence or shock, Weil despaired of doing something about the war. Or, at least, doing something beyond what she had been doing for months: eating no more than those living in occupied France, who were subject to extreme rationing, were able to eat. Given her tubercular lungs, paralyzing migraines, and weak heart, this act of “doing something” proved no less fatal than parachuting onto the front lines.

Yet her dashed hopes remained with her till her dying day. The last entry she wrote in her journal was just one word: “Nurses.”

Did Weil, as the coroner concluded, kill herself? We will never know the answer, of course. But I cannot help but quote a coroner’s report on a Jesuit priest from The Plague, a novel by one of Weil’s great admirers, Albert Camus: hers is a “doubtful case.” For Weil, death was neither the means nor the end to philosophy. Instead, it was a possible consequence of doing philosophy — at least if we understand philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a way of life. As the contemporary philosopher Costica Bradatan observes in his brilliant study Dying for Ideas, “philosophizing is not about thinking, speaking or writing […] but about something else: deciding to put your body on the line.”

This is too much to ask of nearly all of us, at least to the fatal degree Weil asked it of herself. But as with Socrates and Seneca, Weil obliges us to recall not just the price of the philosophical life, but also its purpose.

Remembering Simone Weil: The Price and the Purpose of Philosophy. By Robert Zaretsky. Los Angeles Review of Books , August  24, 2018

In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, German-Jewish émigré and political theorist extraordinaire, chillingly wrote: “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.” (p.459, Harvest edition 1979). Totalitarianism is decidedly different from garden-variety authoritarianism. But the cascading environmental, economic, and political crises we face as a species, and the rising tide of fascism and authoritarianism around the globe, make it clear that, although the present is grim enough, the future has the potential to be very dark indeed. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. So we must urgently answer the question of how to humanize modernity “in a manner worthy of man.” How can we create a world where all people feel grounded and truly at home? Arendt, and her French contemporary Simone Weil, may offer us answers.

One of the key characteristics of capitalist modernity, Hannah Arendt thought, was that people live as “isolated individuals in an atomized society,” in a world premised on the infinite expansion of profit and power and the ruthless marginalization of anyone considered disposable or superfluous (Origins p.235). Arendt noted that as a result, the first half of the twentieth century spawned “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth” (p.vii).

Warnings about the tremendous danger of rootlessness run throughout The Origins of Totalitarianism’s nearly five hundred pages. Arendt argued that people who feel themselves to be rootless or homeless will seek a home at any price, with possibly horrific results. For this reason, the “competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual” (p.317) in capitalist mass society can pave the way for authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Indeed, the atomized and individualized mass is a necessary precondition for totalitarianism (p.318). Languishing in a “situation of spiritual and social homelessness” (p.352), shorn of sustaining social bonds and ties, individuals are forced to live in a world where they cannot exist meaningfully and fruitfully. They try to escape this agonizing limbo and, in the absence of powerful inclusive left-wing alternatives, they look to exclusivist reactionary movements for succour. In this way, tribalism and racism are the bitter fruit of territorial rootlessness. They are wrongheaded attempts to secure roots. But rather than securing roots for the rootless masses, they simply create ‘metaphysical rootlessness’. Totalitarian and proto-totalitarian movements represent what Arendt calls a ‘fictitious home’ for people to “escape from disintegration and disorientation.” (p.381) Their ideology provides a psychic haven for the resentful, the enraged, and the fearful: “Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency… in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home…” (p.353). But as with tribalism and racism, totalitarianism intensifies the very rootlessness, isolation, and alienation that many people sought to flee in the first place. As Arendt wrote, loneliness constitutes “the essence of totalitarian government” (p.475), and the “isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure” (p.407). She observes that “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness… has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” (p.478)

Arendt also says that up rootedness and superfluousness have been “the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution” (p.475). Up rootedness is often the preliminary condition for superfluousness, and superfluousness leads to ‘the genocide of the superfluous’. The genocidal nightmare that destroyed Europe and culminated in the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was fundamentally caused by a psychological and spiritual crisis. This crisis was itself caused by a host of factors, primarily economic, but also philosophical, cultural, and social. The fabric of capitalist modernity was unsuited to human life, and the result of this maladjustment of social systems to the basic human need for rootedness, was death on an immense scale. For, according to Arendt, the principle of endless accumulation at the heart of capitalism, the principle which causes up rootedness and superfluity in the first place, is deadly: “its logical consequence is the destruction of all living communities” (p.137). This is because communities require boundaries and demarcation. Against the perpetual-motion mania of capitalism and its rejection of any limits, Arendt advocates stability, order, and borders – to be achieved through principles that ground, delimit, and root people physically and psychically.

Simone Weil, writing at the height of World War II in some of the darkest hours of the struggle against fascism, arrived at a similar conclusion in her oft-neglected but magnificent book, The Need for Roots (1943). The book was about the reconstruction of France and, by implication, all of Western civilization. In it she wrote that: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” (p.41)

Weil’s method for rerooting humanity is to identify fundamental human needs and devise ways of fulfilling each of them, detailing necessary social reforms. Arendt defined rootedness as having a “place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others” (Origins, p.475). Weil defines rootedness similarly, albeit in more depth, saying that it is “real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future” (The Need for Roots, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1952 edition, p.41).

Weil is candid in admitting that it’s difficult to derive a general principle which tells us when we’ve discovered a need; but she quite rightly says that the needs of the body are obvious, that the needs of the soul are identifiable by introspection and careful thought, and that one hallmark of all needs is that they have limits (p.11). She takes it as morally axiomatic that biological needs generate obligations and social rights. It’s evident that all people need shelter, food, water, heat, clothing, healthcare, and other essentials to maintain themselves, and Weil says this creates a duty for society to provide them. Where her thought is more surprising is when she talks about non-biological needs, or what she calls ‘the needs of the soul’. Gently pushing back against materialists who might neglect such needs, she reminds us that “Everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul” (p.7).

The analogy Weil draws between food for the soul and food for the body is instructive, as it underscores the thought that bodily and spiritual needs are equally important for human thriving. This isn’t to suggest that suffering an empty stomach is acceptable so long as the hungry person’s need for freedom of expression is met, for example. But it is a useful reminder for an age that, under the influence of utilitarianism and neoliberal economics, thinks about politics in strictly material terms. Politics must nurture body and soul.

The primary spiritual need is for order. But Weil uses the word ‘order’ in a rather unorthodox sense. Conventionally, a politics centred on order would be authoritarian and hierarchical. She does speak elsewhere of a spiritual need for ‘hierarchism’ – that is, a sense of being fitted into a definite position in a harmoniously ordered social mechanism; but her idea of order is more aesthetic and philosophical than it is explicitly political. Weil defines order as beauty, harmony, and the reduction of contradiction between an individual’s various moral duties. She believes that one measure of a society’s sickness is the level of dissonance that an individual confronts in trying to fulfill all her moral duties.

The second spiritual need is for liberty, which Weil defines as true, genuine, substantive freedom of choice. Anticipating behavioural psychology and existentialist philosophy, echoing classical critiques of luxury and license, and harmonizing with Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), she writes, “When the possibilities of choice are so wide as to injure the commonweal, men cease to enjoy liberty. For they must either seek refuge in irresponsibility, puerility, and indifference – a refuge where the most they can find is boredom – or feel themselves weighed down by responsibility at all times for fear of causing harm to others. Under such circumstances, men believing wrongly that they are in possession of liberty, and feeling that they get no enjoyment out of it, end up thinking that liberty is not a good thing” (p.13). We live in an age of apparently unparalleled latitude of choice; but many of these choices are artificial, manufactured, and, to use Sigmund Freud’s term, based on the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. So here the tyranny of choice is undeniable; and as Weil’s discussion of excessive choice and its antagonism towards liberty itself suggests, the word ‘tyranny’ is more than a mere rhetorical flourish. A rooted society would instead restrict choice somewhat, in order to make our choices real. (She elsewhere advocates absolute freedom of expression.)

Many of our spiritual needs are paired and opposite. This reflects Weil’s understanding that the soul has different needs at different times and that it may have contradictory needs at the same time.

First, Weil thinks that the human soul has both the need to obey – that is, to freely bestow one’s consent to legitimate authority – and the need to exercise responsibility, which she links to the desire to “feel oneself useful and even indispensable” (p.14). This is reminiscent of the classical Athenian ideal that every citizen rule and be ruled in turn. Making decisions is tiring. After a while it can be quite a relief to delegate one’s decisions to a person or institution that you trust, secure in the belief that they will do the right thing. To dip into psychoanalysis a bit, for people fortunate enough to have loving parents, this hearkens back to infancy and youth, when you entrusted your parents with the task of looking after your needs. However, over-reliance on others can give rise to indolence and decadence, and having others trust and rely on you to a certain extent can be tremendously empowering. It is vital for human health and wellbeing to have the power to make a difference to another person or to the world at large. There’s a reason psychologists discuss people’s loci of control and their sense of self-efficacy: people who have autonomy and responsibility are happier. To take a simple example, elderly patients in nursing homes who care for plants have better health than those who don’t. Weil herself notes that unemployment confounds the need to feel useful, and consequently, she thinks unemployment must be abolished.

Another duality Weil identifies is the need for equality on one hand and the need for social prestige on the other. She isn’t a communist or socialist, so she doesn’t seem to believe in economic equality; but she does advocate the absolute equality of respect for all people regardless of their social station, and she deplores the pernicious influence on society of capitalism’s money-worship: “By making money the sole, or almost the sole, motive of all actions… the poison of inequality has been introduced everywhere” (p.17). Yet in addition to the need to be treated equally, people need to distinguish themselves, benignly, from their fellow citizens. We are all individuals, and our individuality demands respect.

Social recognition is one of our most fundamental needs as social beings, as Hegel famously recognized with his formulation of the master-slave dialectic. Weil also asserts that people have an innate longing for social prestige, the desire to belong to a “noble tradition enshrined in past history and given public acknowledgment” (p.19). Cultural and religious traditions, professional lore, and other forms of collective memory, must be preserved and transmitted, so we can enjoy a direct connection to our forebears and root ourselves in time. Donald Trump’s stunning election victory has illuminated the fraught relationship between equality and social prestige. The grotesque level of economic inequality in America, coupled with simmering cultural resentments towards political elites who are separated from working-class Americans of all races by immense social and economic chasms, has propelled both left- and right-wing populism. Part of what lifted Trump to the White House was undoubtedly fear of immigration and a reaction against progress towards equality for minority groups. (Unfortunately, such progress had been more symbolic and cultural than substantive anyway.) But these regressive elements of voters’ motivations cannot be easily disentangled from economic elements, partially because economic inequality aggravates racism and xenophobia by stoking anxieties about jobs and security.

Several other ideas Weil mentions are extremely relevant for present-day politics. She thinks human beings crave security, which she defines as freedom from fear and terror, most notably liberation from the threat of unemployment and ‘police persecution’ (p.32).

Fearful animals lash out; insecure people do the same. Weil wisely observes that “Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others” (p.45). Arendt agrees, writing that “rootlessness as a conscious aim was based primarily upon hatred of a world that had no place for ‘superfluous’ men, so that its destruction could become a supreme political goal” (Origins, pp.196-197). Weil calls unemployment “up rootedness raised to the second power” (p.43): it doubly destabilizes people’s lives, cutting them off from both money and social connections. Its spectre constantly haunts the most vulnerable members of society. Weil identifies money-power and economic domination as two of the biggest causes of destabilization, declaring: “Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive” (p.42). Capitalism injects instability and fear into every nook and cranny of social life. People rendered superfluous by the churning mechanism of an inhuman economic order want others to feel the sting they felt feel from ostracism and dehumanization. Insecurity breeds resentment; resentment breeds outright hostility. Weil opines, probably correctly, that risk is an ineradicable element of the human condition and the human soul in fact desires some level of risk; but she is adamant that knowing one’s basic material needs will be met is essential if people are to feel securely rooted in society.

Weil’s final pairing of needs is very thought-provoking: private property and collective property.

First, she thinks that every person or family should own their own house, land, and tools. That is, to be independent, every person should control their own means of subsistence. Moreover, psychological research attests to the fundamental importance we attach to objects. The objects we own aren’t simply things we use: we invest beloved objects with spiritual and symbolic value; they become parts of the self. Ensuring that every person owns certain goods that they can call their own makes good psychological sense. However, in isolation, this might feed into a false sense of social independence. On the contrary, we are all dependent on other people throughout our lives. Our interdependence is an inescapable, if sometimes irritating, aspect of what it means to be human. People might be tempted to deny this if the economy is entirely structured around the ideal of independence. Yet some recognition of the importance of private property is perfectly compatible with an economy that acknowledges the irreducibly social nature of our communal life.

While not calling for nationalization or collectivization as some might well do, Weil balances the need for private property with the need for collective property. In her view, individuals require a sense of genuine ownership of public and communal goods in order to identify with the collectivity. The alienation and dehumanization that comes with modern workplace conditions make this sense of identification impossible for workers in large factories and corporations. So Weil calls for the abolition of large industrial enterprises and the “dispersion of industrial activity” (p.74). She recommends a return to small-scale industry, artisanal production, and craftsmanship. Working to realize Weil’s ideal of everyone having private ownership of their means of production would require a massive, yet massively beneficial, redistribution of wealth and power from Wall Street to the working class and the poor. Indeed, in our age of mostly unchecked global warming and colossally concentrated corporations, such a non-reformist reform is crucial.

The Need for Roots isn’t beyond criticism. Weil’s heavy emphasis on Christianity is somewhat unsuited to the spirit of our pluralist age (and probably wasn’t entirely in tune with the spirit of the age in 1943, either). Secularism may indeed need some rethinking: part of the problem of modernity is excessive rationalization. The disenchantment of the world is unhealthy, and modern life needs to be respiritualized. But most of us can no longer take Christian principles as given. Weil’s elevation of physical labour to the pinnacle of civilized values is related to her social Catholicism, and seems dated today. It has a reactionary flavour and poses distinct problems for those of us who wish to champion increased leisure as we think about reconstructing our society for an age whose technological possibilities are incomparably greater than in the 1940s. But, setting such minor difficulties aside, Weil’s book is a masterpiece, and her thought is refreshingly clear and free from modern cant.

Weil’s analyses of the human soul’s many needs are united by two essential motifs: spirituality and connectedness. She wants to reintroduce spirituality to modernity, enabling the earthly realm of politics to at least partially reflect the “realm situated high above all men” (p.18).

People exist in space and time, and Weil dwells on the importance of rooting ourselves temporally as well as physically. We need to feel connected to the past and its resources; the sense of continuity in time we derive from history is an essential nutrient for the soul (p.96). Cautioning us against facile progressivism, Weil notes: “It would be useless to turn one’s back on the past in order to simply concentrate on the future. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that such a thing is even possible” (p.48). She also movingly comments: “Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy” (p.114). The uprooting of culture is a problem that must be combated via educational reforms if we are to establish ourselves securely on the planet. We must learn to see ideas and concepts as living nodes in a grand interconnected web of knowledge and wisdom. In this context, the disjointed jumble of disconnected facts and desiccated data that these days often passes for education is itself a threat to rootedness.

Weil wrote prophetically that “Four obstacles above all separate us from a form of civilization likely to be worth something: our false conception of greatness; the degradation of the sentiment of justice; our idolization of money; and our lack of religious inspiration” (p.209). If we read the word ‘religious’ generally, or substitute the word ‘spiritual’, she is absolutely right. She also wrote that the task facing the Western world was “transforming society in such a way that the working-class may be given roots in it” (p.46). More than seventy-five years later, our task has not changed.

A Radical Cure: Hannah Arendt & Simone Weil on the Need for Roots. By Scott Remer.  Philosophy Now, August / September 2018.

Seventy-five years ago, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil joined Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement in London. We do not know if the Catholic and conservative general, who never met Weil, knew she had left her post as a professor of philosophy in order to work on assembly lines, left her family to fight alongside anarchists in Spain and left her country to escape the anti-Semitic Vichy regime. All we do know is that de Gaulle read Weil’s plan to parachute white-uniformed nurses onto battlefields, armed only with the obligation to succor the injured and sacrifice their own lives. Setting down the paper, de Gaulle blurted: “But, she’s crazy!”

De Gaulle was right about the plan, but not the person. In fact, Weil’s reflections on the nature of obligation offer a bracing dose of sanity in our perplexing and polarizing times. During the final months of her life — she died in the summer of 1943 — Weil wrote of several of her most subversive and seminal texts. (That they were essentially position papers for the Free French makes them all the more extraordinary.) This is particularly true for “Human Personality” and “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” both of which are devoted to distinctions Weil insists upon personal rights and impersonal duties.

When we talk about justice today, we almost always find ourselves talking about rights we believe are entrenched in nature and have been enshrined in our founding documents. This language reflects a liberal conception of human action and interaction, casting us as rational agents who reach agreements with one another through calculation and negotiation. Moreover, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, while each of us “has a conception of the good or worthwhile life,” none of us accepts “a socially endorsed conception of the good.” In essence, the ideal of right has ceded to the ideal of rights.

The problem, for Weil, with the liberal conception of rights — and the laws that codify them — is that it is rooted in the personal, not the impersonal. Our society, she insists, is one where personal rights are tied at the hip to private property. Taking his cue from Weil, political theorist Edward Andrew suggests that a rights-based society “is the consensual society where everything is vendible at constitutional conventions or the marketplace.” This reveals what Weil, like Thomas Hobbes, believes to be the sole universal truth concerning human affairs: certain groups will always wield greater clout than other groups. “Rights talk” deals with the relative and alienable, not absolute and inalienable. For Weil, the old joke about our legal system — “How much justice can you afford?” — takes on a tragic immediacy.

Moreover, the emphasis on “inalienable human rights”— a phrase, Weil declares, history has shown to be meaningless — blinds us to the only true good, one rooted in what Weil calls the “impersonal.” This term, paradoxically, describes what is most essential to our flesh and blood lives: the needs shared by all human beings and the obligations (and not rights) to one another that they entail. These needs, listed in her “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” include nourishment and clothing, medical care and housing, as well as protection against violence. (Though opposed to capital punishment, Weil made an exception for rape.)

With her knack for striking illustrations, Weil confronts us with the limits of rights claims. “If someone tries to browbeat a farmer to sell his eggs at a moderate price, the farmer can say: ‘I have the right to keep my eggs if I don’t get a good enough price.’ But if a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation, the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”

This is why, when we ask why we have less than others, we are getting personal, but when we ask why we are being hurt, we are getting impersonal. And for Weil, the impersonal is good in every sense of the word. In the case of her illustration, Weil finds the notion of rights ludicrous because the girl is not being cheated of a profit. Instead, she is being cheated of her very humanity. There is no true compensation for such acts. And yet, by confusing personal rights with impersonal (or universally shared) needs, we burden ourselves with a language that deflects us from what is truly at stake. As Weil declares: “There is something sacred in every human being, but it is not their person. It is this human being; no more and no less.”

While Weil was responding to the crisis of Western democracies confronting the challenge of fascism, her essays can also help us think about our own crisis of political governance and legitimacy. Take the current debate over the Trump administration’s proposal to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, or food stamps. Rather than receiving cash installments on their electronic benefit-transfer cards, those enrolled in the program will instead receive boxes of tinned and canned food.

Fortunately, the proposal seems fated for the shredding machine, but it still serves as a useful example. Those using rights language would reply that the government hasn’t the right to cut their money payments because they have the right to do their own shopping. But we can also frame the criticism in obligation language: “It is unjust to replace financial assistance with box meals, which will punish both our physical and emotional well-being.” While the first response would ignite what Weil calls the “spirit of contention,” the latter response might “touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention.”

In other words, such a reply asks us to forget about ourselves and instead attend to other lives. Moral situations require, as one of Weil’s great fans, Iris Murdoch, wrote, an “unsentimental, detached, unselfish and objective perspective.” Such attentiveness allows a moral and political clarity that “rights language” simply cannot. Paying attention, for Weil, is the most fundamental of our obligations. It forces us to recognize that what she calls “le malheur,” or suffering, lies in store for all of us. “I may lose at any moment,” she wrote, “through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself.”

This includes my sense of autonomy, reflected in so banal an act as buying groceries, but also in much more dramatic acts. The contemporary philosopher Andrea Nye suggests that Weil also throws a bracing light on the debate over abortion. In effect, the related notions of obligation and attention offer a third way between those who claim the fetus’s right to life and those who insist upon a woman’s right to choose. Rejecting these rights-based claims, Nye writes, a “Weilian feminist might listen to the women themselves as they attempt to make sense of their lives in order to come to a binding sense of what must be done to restore social balance and create a society in which obligations do not conflict.” Such an approach might invite a woman seeking an abortion to fully attend to a situation which does not implicate her alone.

I do not mean to present all this as a panacea to our current political predicament, one that Weil would surely dismiss, as she did France’s on the eve of World War II, as an “incredible barrage of lies, of demagogy, of boasting admixed with panic,” one of “disarray, in sum a totally intolerable atmosphere.” Yet, even if her insights into what she called the “social drama” do not always lead to clarity, they do oblige us to consider how politics would change if we made room for obligation.

What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil’s Radical Reminder. By Robert Zaretsky. The New York Times, February 20, 2018.

                              Simone Weil  with her brother in her teens

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters “on the knees of his heart”—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil’s anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their “views.” As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

This new volume of translations from Simone Weil’s work, Selected Essays 1934-43, displays her somewhat marginally. It contains one great essay, the opening essay here titled “Human Personality” which was written in 1943, the year of her death in England at the age of thirty-four. (This essay, by the way, was first published in two parts under the title “The Fallacy of Human Rights” in the British magazine The Twentieth Century in May and June 1959. There it suffered the curious and instructive fate of requiring a defensive editorial in June, when the second part of the essay appeared, replying to criticism of the magazine’s decision to publish the essay “on the grounds that it involves heavy going for some readers.” It certainly speaks volumes about the philistine level of English intellectual life, if even as good a magazine as The Twentieth Century cannot muster an enthusiastic, grateful audience for such a piece.) Another essay, placed last in the book, called “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” also written the year of her death, contains matter central to Simone Weil’s ideas. The remaining essays are on specific historical and political subjects—two on the civilization of Languedoc, one on a proletarian uprising in Renaissance Florence, several long essays on the Roman Empire which draw an extensive parallel between imperial Rome and Hitler’s Germany, and various reflections on the Second World War, the colonial problem, and the post-war future. There is also an interesting and sensitive letter to George Bernanos. The longest argument of the book, spanning several essays, develops the parallel between Rome (and the ancient Hebrew theocracy!) and Nazi Germany. According to Simone Weil, who displays an unpleasant silence on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Hitler is no worse than Napoleon, than Richelieu, than Caesar. Hitler’s racialism, she says, is nothing more than “a rather more romantic name for nationalism.” Her fascination with the psychological effects of wielding power and submitting to coercion, combined with her strict denial of any idea of historical progress, led her to equate all forms of state authority as manifestations of what she calls “the great beast.”

Readers of Simone Weil’s Notebooks (two volumes, published in 1959) and her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (1958) will be familiar with her attempt to derive everything distinctively Christian from Greek spirituality as well as to deny entirely Christianity’s Hebraic origins. This fundamental argument—along with her admiration for Provençal civilization, for the Manichean and Catharist heresies—colors all her historical essays. I cannot accept Simone Weil’s gnostic reading of Christianity as historically sound (its religious truth is another matter); nor can I fail to be offended by the vindictive parallels she draws between Nazism, Rome, and Israel. Impartiality, no more than a sense of humor, is not the virtue of a writer like Simone Weil. Like Gibbon (whose view of the Roman Empire she absolutely contradicts), Simone Weil as a historical writer is tendentious, exhaustive, and infuriatingly certain. As a historian she is simply not at her best; no one who disbelieves so fundamentally in the phenomena of historical change and innovation can be wholly satisfying as a historian. This is not to deny that there are subtle historical insights in these essays: as for example, when she points out that Hitlerism consists in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination. (Immediately after, of course, she says that these—both Hitler’s methods and the “normal colonial ones”—are derived from the Roman model.)

The principal value of the collection is simply that anything from Simone Weil’s pen is worth reading. It is perhaps not the book to start one’s acquaintance with this writer—Waiting for God, I think, is the best for that. The originality of her psychological insight, the passion and subtlety of her theological imagination , the fecundity of her exegetical talents are unevenly displayed here. Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as surely as in any of her other books—the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.

Simone Weil. By Susan Sontag. The New York Review of Books. Simone Weil. February 1, 1963

Also of interest : 

Simone Weil. By A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Benjamin P. Davis. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published  March 10, 2018