French philosopher, labor activist, and religious mystic who refused the distance between thought and suffering — leaving the lecture hall to work in factories, making attention and affliction the center of ethics, and pursuing God to the very edge of the Church without entering it, in a body of work published almost entirely after her early death.
A brilliant young philosophy teacher took unpaid leave to stand at a factory press, on purpose, to learn what industrial labor does to a person from the inside. Simone Weil spent her short life closing the gap between what she thought and what she was willing to endure. The work she left behind, almost all of it published after she died, still unsettles readers because she tried to live every demand she made.