Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, 688 pp, $17.80

In G.K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross, the whimsical Catholic apologist opines (through a dialogue between two characters gazing at the steeple of a church) about the proper hierarchy of the titular items atop the steeple. The unsubtly named nihilist revolutionary Professor Lucifer posits that the appearance of the cross atop a blank globe on the steeple of a church is an imposition of arbitrariness upon the perfect form of the sphere beneath it.

“This globe is reasonable; that cross is unreasonable,” says Professor Lucifer. “It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all things at enmity with itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction.”

Professor Lucifer’s interlocutor, the Bulgarian monk Brother Michael, accepts this premise but asserts that the cross is truer to nature and to humanity, implicitly synthesizing Christian teleology with Darwinian evolution.

“That cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I,” Brother Michael says. “That is a struggle in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is irrational. You say the cross is a quadruped with one limb longer than the rest. I say man is a quadruped who only uses two of his legs.”

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Cuddly Toys

directed by Kansas Bowling, produced by Bitter Suite Films

Actors

directed by Betsey Brown, produced by No Trespassing, the Ion Pack, Sick Films

Eco Village

directed by Phoebe Nir, produced by All the Frenzy Production, Luca Severi Production Group

Three movies by three first-time directors perfectly encapsulate an emerging subgenre of independent cinema. Actors by Betsey Brown, Cuddly Toys by Kansas Bowling, and Eco Village by Phoebe Nir typify this genre, which represents the nauseating overstimulation and overexposure of the digital age. I call the genre mumble-B. The mumble-B movie is influenced by B-movies, queer cinema, and mumblecore alike.

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Skull-Cults & Corpse Brides: Essays Vol II

Stone Age Herbalist, independently published, 334 pp, $16.99

When I was 10 years old, my second cousin once removed, who had recently become my uncle by marriage, told me a ghost story. Through his marriage to my mother’s sister, two large tracts of land in eastern Pennsylvania were reunited, consolidating a family inheritance of real property dating back to the 1700s. Two sides of the family descending from two brothers had fought and would continue fighting over property boundaries, title, and buyouts. This sort of conflict has a technical name: subinfeudation.

This first story was a test run for the stories to come. My uncle told it in the mode that would become customary: head hung down, chin glued to chest in a pose of self-doubt, anticipating skepticism by poking holes in his own account. 

In the 1970s, on a dairy farm where he had fled his prominent and intimidating East Coast family, my uncle was carrying out a farmhand’s standard chore, bringing cattle into the barn at night—a task he completed regularly without incident. But on this night, the cattle stopped in their tracks just before the entrance to the barn and refused to go any further. He coaxed them with feed and pushed against their rumps, but the cattle wouldn’t budge. At some point he noticed that all the cattle were looking up. He followed their line of sight into the barn where he saw a figure: dark, flat, and floating in the rafters. In his telling, when he saw the figure and the cattle saw that he saw, they moved into the barn en masse without prompting.  

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The Burnout Society

Byung-Chul Han edited and translated. by Erik Butler, Standford University Press, 68 pp, $12.60

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Byung-Chul Han edited and translated. by Erik Butler, Verso Books, 96 pp, $13.78

Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy

Byung-Chul Han edited and translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 80 pp, $16.95 

Just as political language both describes and expresses political forces, every public intellectual is both a doctor and a patient in the mental hospital of contemporary life. Defined against each other as products in a cornered market, each combines a diagnosis with a malady without it being certain which is which. Things are said or not said, topics are addressed or not addressed and allowed to be addressed by certain people and not others, depending on what an audience is prepared to think about, and think about itself. Some writers are showered with accolades, others are effectively suppressed by silence, and a handful are attacked relentlessly, yet continue to say what they believe.

Nowhere is this ambiguity better crystallized than in the case of Byung-Chul Han. Usually identified as a philosopher, Han is better characterized as a theorist of contemporary global culture: He is also its articulation and perhaps its self-critique. The most successful German-speaking intellectual export since Peter Sloterdijk, the South Korean-born Han also is the herald of a post-national German culture which seeks to downplay, if not eliminate, national reference points in favor of a global outlook. In contrast to the famous model of the mighty German thinker writing thick tomes in impenetrable prose, Han produces slim texts in a flat, anodyne style perfectly calibrated for reading on planes.

Beginning with his breakthrough success The Burnout Society in 2015, more than 20 of Han’s slim books have been published in English, each one more or less the same. Usually clocking in at 90 pages or fewer, they offer a therapeutically inflected phenomenology of contemporary malaise, wrapped around updates of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Han’s books are not really books but hybrid objects, located midway between books and screens, almost the analogues of expansion packs, which recycle a small cluster of themes with tonal variation instead of critical development.

Han’s central argument is that the corporate and political “neoliberal” integration of digital technology into global society is dystopian and depressing. The society of perpetual self-reinvention is an exhausted society, the transparent society is a society of surveillance, and the world of absolute connectivity is a world of complete alienation. 

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This pessimistic attitude is now more or less pervasive among the global intelligentsia, accompanied by apathetic resignation. There is nothing to be done, or even anything to say. Revolution is impossible because capitalism has already fully incorporated it into its own abstract dynamics. Counterrevolution is unthinkable. All that remains is compiling catalogues of artificial emotions, and itemizing the microtones of contemporary monotony, while waxing nostalgic for the passions of yesteryear.

Han’s persistent evasion of ideological controversy has made him one of an increasingly small number of thinkers who still retains readers across the political spectrum. Institutional art curators, cypherpunk filmmakers and traditionalist podcasters are all able to find something of value in his work, or at least something familiar. But Han’s widespread appeal is bought at an intellectual cost. Despite discussing the alienating effects of globalization, Han has nothing to say about accelerating mass migration or the liquidation of national sovereignty: Ultimately, he turns away from addressing politically critical issues in favor of neologistic cartographies characterized by a lacuna of detail. Engaged intellectuals once searched for new weapons. Han, the detached intellectual, prefers vague reifications which implicate nobody and nothing. Intent on remaining above it all, he restricts his concern to the lukewarm, and avoids more extreme manifestations intensifying across contemporary society. His books are an oasis of boredom in a desert of horror.

Han’s 2022 book Infocracy continues the trajectory of his 2017 book Psychopolitics, which signaled an intensifying regression to the midwit mean. The principal enemy is Big Data, “a highly efficient psychopolitical instrument that makes it possible to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of social communication.” Identified as the “tool” of a “mutant” neoliberal “regime,” Big Data is described as “an intelligent system for exploiting freedom.” It “does not paint a second reality behind the given, behind the data; it is a totalitarianism without ideology.” 

But Big Data doesn’t lack for ideology. The “antiracist” surrealism of new AI products is the just the most recent iteration of a tightening silicon cage that in recent years has made internet search almost unusable and shows little sign of changing course. But Han is oblivious.

Han’s clipped style supplies a mystique of authority to consistently misplaced, and arguably dishonest pronouncements. “The information regime does not pursue a biopolitical agenda,” he writes in Technocracy. “It is not interested in the body.” The regime is more interested in the body than ever; in fact it has extended its interests from muscles to hormones and experimental vaccines. Han has nothing to say about this. “[T]he information regime has no need for disciplinary pressure. It does not impose panoptic visibility on people,” Han writes. The regime precisely imposes this. For this purpose it has established a rhizomatic repression market served by psychologically deformed activist-journalists, third-rate academics, and failed artists. Han is oblivious to this as well.

What is happening here is a form of foreclosure designed to maintain Han as a party member in good standing by ignoring the truth of contemporary political power. To avoid being targeted for ideological repression himself, Han pretends that there is none. By the end of Technocracy, this strategy has generated so much cognitive dissonance that he almost appears to be confessing his own critical failure. “The vocabulary is radically reduced,” he writes. “Linguistic nuances are eradicated in order to prevent any subtlety of thought. People are deprived of the ability to conceive of a world that is different from that projected by the Party. The total lie bends language itself and turns it into lying. Clear conceptual distinctions are made impossible.” The topic of this passage is Orwell’s 1984. But Han could be describing himself. Perhaps is not surprising that Han’s most recently published work deals with the collapse of narrative. The narrative in question is his own.

One can still find on YouTube a clip of Han reading a statement in 2021 at the Villa Massimo in Rome, where Heidegger lectured in 1936 while sporting a swastika lapel pin. Then resident in Italy on a prestigious German government fellowship, Han announces that he has lost respect for Giorgio Agamben after the Italian thinker declined to appear at the Villa Massimo to debate him. Agamben made clear his reasons: He refused to apply for a government-mandated Green Pass which would have been necessary to secure his appearance. In this way, Han claimed, Agamben had made “a political abuse of a friendly personal invitation to stubbornly demonstrate his problematic position because he sees vaccination as a purpose of political domination of the state or because, like many anti-vaxxers . . . he is simply stupid . . . I have the feeling that Agamben does not know what a democracy is.” When push comes to shove, as it did, everything anyone needs to know about Han is right here. “In a totalitarian state that is built on a universal lie, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act,” he ends Technocracy. But he is no revolutionary.

Ross Barkan is a novelist and journalist. His next novel, Glass Century, is due out next year, and he’s working on a book for Verso about the contemporary political situation.

Daniel Miller is the literary editor of IM-1776 and the writer of the film Borderline (2023).

Rose Lyddon is studying for a DPhil in Theology at the University of Oxford and writes keep your mind in hell and despair not on Substack.

Clare Casey is an anthropologist working on a book about nonprofit industries and the healthcare-welfare state.

Alex Perez is a cultural critic and fiction writer. He edits RealClear Books & Culture.

Shae Sennett is a writer, filmmaker, and a playwright whose reporting and criticism has been featured in Slash Film, Screen Slate, and other publications.

Matthew Gasda is a writer, director, and critic in New York City.

Nicholas Dolinger is the author of Sunbathing I Want To and the host of The Beautiful Toilet podcast.

Veronica Gabrielle is an art and music critic for The New Criterion. She also co-hosts the Temple of Friendship podcast.

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The Mars Review of Books Foundation - Publisher

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Design

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Samuel Henriquez - Managing Editor

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Nick Simmons - Advisor

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Special thanks to Sam Frank, Darby Hyde, and Hadley Starnes.

Scratching The Back

a sculpture series by Nairy Baghramian, on view at the Met Fifth Avenue 

Look Again: European Paintings 1300–1800 

on view at the Met Fifth Avenue in Galleries 600–644, ongoing

Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting

on view at the Met Fifth Avenue in Galleries 691–693 through June 9

Scratching the Back, a series of sculptures by the Iranian artist Nairy Baghramian, currently inhabits the Met’s entrance niche. The work comprises four statues: various assortments of Corporate Memphis-colored rubble reminiscent of bulk curbside disposal day, complete with what look just like discarded white IKEA Kallax shelf units. Their uncanny resemblance to trash functions as a safeguard for whenever someone speaks the truth: “This looks like shit.”

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INCEL: A Novel 

by

POSITIVE XP LLC, 336 pp., $14.95 

Mixtape Hyperborea 

by Adem Luz Rienspects

Independently Published, 237 pp., $13.69 

The louche or unabashedly noxious young man has mostly vanished from contemporary American fiction. He is neither author nor subject; there are few, if any, male equivalents of Ottessa Moshfegh or Lexi Freiman, nor of their scatological, misanthropic protagonists. (Only Teddy Wayne, of the leading male novelists under 50, seems interested in such disreputable males.) One can argue this is progress or something else entirely, but it is a trend that is hard to deny. Male lust and male rage is for the internet now. On the physical terrain, in the realm of literature, it is mostly excised.

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There are numerous polls and studies that tell us men are no longer reading, men are falling behind in school, and men, in this transmogrifying economy, are struggling to adapt. A different sort of literary culture—one not dominated by the affluent and the college-educated—would be interested in these stories. What does male alienation look like? What about consciousness at its most fraught, its most poisoned? Or what about, simply, existence that is not so Manichean, not merely cleaved between white knights and deplorables? 

It might be left to outsiders to tell these tales. Luckily, two have emerged, both through the route of self-publishing. It is a testament to the changing times that more novelists are publishing on their own and not waiting on sclerotic gatekeepers. When fresh, invigorating works emerge this way, it’s also an indictment of the publishing houses that either rejected them or never would have considered them in the first place. Incel, by ARX-Han, and Mixtape Hyperborea, by Adem Luz Rienspects, were each published last year by pseudonymous authors. Each, in one form or another, confronts the intrigues and perils of manhood. Both are set in unnamed locales and told in the first-person, their narrators nameless or virtually nameless (INCEL’s is called Anon). Both have distinct temporal settings—2007 for Mixtape Hyperborea, 2012 for INCEL—and both are unexpectedly wistful. 

ARX-Han, in particular, is a formidable talent, as if Bret Easton Ellis decided to make a deep study of Reddit and the byzantine off-roads of evolutionary psychology. INCEL is, as its title suggests, the story of an incel. It is remarkably ambitious, plenty unsettling, and mordantly funny. Anon, the incel in question, narrates his lonely, furious quest to have sex before his 23rd birthday. He is a graduate student in a city that seems like some blend of New York and Chicago; he has one lone friend, a Korean American named Jason, and Jason’s race is relevant because Anon is a white supremacist. This is quite literal—he believes pale-skinned people of Western European descent like himself are superior to everyone else—and he offers, throughout the novel, crude taxonomies of every other race he comes across in his diverse city. He berates his sister for liking K-pop but stays loyal to Jason, in part because his friend is everything he is not: tall, macho, gifted in martial arts, and extraordinarily sexually active. Unlike Jason, he moons for the lone girl he ever kissed, an ex-girlfriend he dated for several fitful months.

Anon’s mind is warped by the internet. He is verbose and jargon-addled, inexorably steeped in his graduate studies. Here is how he describes another failed pickup attempt in a nightclub: “Something in my words triggers the programmatic death of the interaction, and a seemingly promising opportunity disintegrates into ashes. Roughly two minutes into our exchange she’s converged on the same placid, zoned-out expression as all the other girls.” The woman has, he adds, “a face that feeds into the front-facing sockets of my binocular skull, activating a tiny module of tissue located in my cerebral cortex.” 

Language like this, peppered throughout 300-plus pages, might seem exhausting but it rarely is. You learn, quickly, to inhabit Anon’s tortured consciousness; he is vile, but he is also deeply sad, even suicidal. His failures, at least, can be funny, as well as his attempts to ape banal human interaction. He tells dates he voted for Obama and likes Coldplay. Even his overt racism comes off as ludicrous—in Reddit forums, he is ridiculed as much as he is validated, and one of the more hilarious bits in the novel is when Anon, to his horror, comes across a Redditor who mocks his Aryan worship by concocting a scenario in which Anon is transported back to England at the start of World War I and is forced to realize, as he’s dying on a battlefield, that his modern conception of whiteness is irrelevant as Germans and British slaughter each other. “Immediately shipped to the front after bare minimum basic training,” the Redditor writes, “because even though he’s in homogenous society he’s totally expendable (elite capitalist class sent him there to die for monies lolololol).”

Most Americans who espouse racist views are not organized into militias or any genuine movements. They are, like Anon, trawling through the abyss of the internet, posting their way to hell; they are, despite furious claims to the contrary, effectively impotent. In Anon’s case, the impotence is literal, as his inability to escape virginhood is bound up in his debilitating anxiety, his struggle to get it up. (“I have to go return some videotapes,” he tells one failed conquest, echoing Patrick Bateman.) Most of the time, he’s hovering around shopping malls and approaching women he’s perpetually rating on a 10-scale, cataloging each snub in a notebook. He models his approach on a “frame-by-frame analysis” of 500 Days of Summer. If he’s home, he’s masturbating. His graduate studies aren’t going much better: His vision of a Skinner box applied to female human sexuality (to answer the question why do women fuck?) horrifies a classmate he hoped would be sympathetic. It is, in the classmate’s view, “the most autistic fucking thing” he’s ever heard.  

“Dude, I’m not autistic,” is Anon’s best rejoinder. 

ARX-Han keeps a focus on Anon’s few interpersonal relationships. He stays close to his sister until she tires of his casual misogyny and racism. His bond with Jason, though, doesn’t break. When not high or having sex, Jason is struggling with his own rage and sorrow, with his father murdered long ago, his mother terminally ill. Following her last wishes, he travels to South Korea to scatter her ashes in the sea. For Anon, death is omnipresent as he contemplates how he might take his own life and, in his more bombastic moments, whether he will reach his Nordic Valhalla. But his bluster never lasts long. He is fundamentally broken, his only hope of communion, at novel’s end, a sharing of pain with a woman next door he long assumed was adulterous. In reality, the woman’s partner, a jovial man who once helped Anon move in, has died of cancer. 

***

The world of Mixtape Hyperborea is not so dire, in part because its protagonist bears fewer psychological wounds and no internet-inflected racism. It’s senior year at Golden Sierra, a somewhat shabby prep school that lies in the mountains and is within bus-trip distance of Washington D.C. The unnamed narrator relishes his drives to school and his mixtape, which serves as a soundtrack for the novel. The playlist is eclectic, ranging from the tragic folk balladeer Jackson C. Frank to Dr. Dre and Nirvana. Everywhere is the sense of an ending—children who have grown up together are heading off to college, trade school, or other nebulous, non-romantic stations of adulthood.

The narrator and his friends, Josh and Micky, drift through shopping malls, try to go to parties, smoke copious amounts of weed, and mythologize their sexual exploits. Contemporary novels don’t seem to do adolescence well; there’s a certain shyness writers have about how teenagers, particularly boys, actually speak to each other. For anyone who came of age in the 2000s, Mixtape Hyperborea will ring especially true. The boys trade slurs as a form of endearment, and grow closer the more they mock-insult each other. The narrator and Josh, who is Hispanic, often engage in a hilarious and ruthless form of the Dozens, a kind of freestyle roast-off, and make obviously fantastic claims about their sexual prowess. Rienspects writes in a staccato rhythm, his single-sentence paragraphs deposited koan-like, his dialogue arriving in crisp bursts.

“How’s it goin’ man?” Micky asks.

“It’s great,” the narrator answers. “I felt a bit possessive of Josh a second ago when I saw you making him laugh, but I’m reminding myself that I really like both of you and want you to become close friends.”

“Psycho,” says Josh. “He’s always saying weird shit like that.” 

“It’s  true,” the narrator replies.

“Also don’t say possessive, you make it sound like we’re gay lovers.”

“I appreciate the honesty,” Micky says. 

Mixtape Hyperborea roves cinematically across Golden Sierra, sharing snatches of teacher dialogue and the straining of their love lives. Toddlers at the K-12 school make appearances too, warily surveyed by the overworked teachers on the playground. The narrator, meanwhile, is reverent of nature and God, and urinates in his backyard each morning while consuming water as a purification ritual. He also enjoys lifting and toying around, alone, with a sword. 

Deceptively poignant scenes are built around the messiness of high school friendship. For the senior trip, the class goes on a ferry ride to an island where they snorkel. Later, they take a bus to D.C. At a museum, the narrator takes stock of his class, one student who’s “borderline psycho,” another who “can’t bring herself to kill bugs,” and Micky who is a “twig with no muscle.” But this triggers only tenderness: “I realize I like everyone just the way they are.” 

At the hotel, where one student brought boxing gloves and headgear, the boys start their own temporary fight club. For the boys, the play-violence—no one is seriously injured—not only bonds them but allows them to verge on a kind of spiritual transcendence. “Each successive strike seems to release a lifetime of tension and repression of which I was prior unaware. Each strike against myself purifies and molds. No one really wins, we just call it after a while.”

Anon, in Incel, spars as well, but he is too tortured, too internet-drunk, to find the same sort of transcendence. Reading these novels together, one gets a sense Anon could have been Mixtape Hyperborea’s protagonist if he had had more friends and a girlfriend. He could have been sensitive to time’s passage, to the slow slippage of youth and the joys and fragilities of quotidian existence. It’s a credit to ARX-Han that he can, through Incel, plumb these depths; few writers summon such artistic courage. He writes of a world we want to look away from but can’t. 

If Incel, set in 2012, represents a period of the recent past not much different than today, a period nearly as atomized and dominated by tech platforms, Mixtape Hyperborea is a callback to the last decade before technology swallowed us whole. For aging millennials, those now trundling through their thirties and forties, it may be a reminder of all they’ve lost. The lives of the teens are raw and unmediated, all meaningful interaction reserved for the schoolyards, parked cars, and movie theaters. For those who didn’t come of age then, those too young to have experienced an adolescence where social media was ancillary, at best, to everyday life, Rienspects offers a particular gut-punch. 

On the last day of school, the narrator laughs with his friends, jokes with teachers, and delights in his new freedom—until he understands what he’s actually losing. “My last genuine school day, rife with boredom, idiosyncrasy, and mundane beauty has already passed,” he says. “It perished without warning.” 

The Shards: A Novel

by Bret Easton Ellis

Vintage Press, 608 pp., $17.06

Above all else, Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Shards is a pornographic book. It is about teenage guys fucking each other—a deeply homoerotic work of fiction. You realize very quickly, opening The Shards, which Ellis originally released as an audiobook in 2021, and which was thus spoken and recorded and re-recorded, that the novel was written to be savored, so to speak: There is a strong element of release, catharsis, a Proustian kind of erotic recollection that permeates the entire book. The Shards is fucked up, updated Proust: Proust on Quaaludes and tequila and coke (rather than whatever weird Victorian sleeping pills Proust himself was on when he wrote In Search of Lost Time).

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Piratas 

directed by Julian Yuri Rodriguez

Lake Mahar 

directed by Julian Yuri Rodriguez

Miami 1996 

directed by Nick Corirossi

Stripper Wars 

directed by Giancarlo Loffredo

Mingus’s The Clown 

directed by Trevor Bazile

When We Lived in Miami 

directed by Amy Seimetz

Chlorophyl 

directed by Barry Jenkins

Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke 

directed by Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva

Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse 

directed by Bleeding Palm

I Am Your Grandma 

directed by Jillian Mayer

Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia 

directed by Lucas Leyva and 14 others

The most Miami movie of all time opens with a developer telling a table of geriatric investors that “Miami is the only city where you could tell a lie at breakfast, and it’ll be true by nightfall.” He’s shilling a luxury tower and needs the money men, like so many other people who’ve ended up in Miami, to buy into what’s undoubtedly a scam of sorts. Miamians, or anyone who’s spent some time in the city, knows that Miami is built on lies and half-truths and lies that somehow become truths and that the magic of living in the city is willingly buying into the bullshit. We call it the Magic City because we’re all scam magicians here. You want the hot girl with the fake tits to blow up your life. You want to disappear into the Everglades and give yourself up to the gators and the pythons. You want to somehow scam yourself into something deeper and true—that’s Miami.

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The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations Towards the Human Being

by Simone Weil

Penguin Classics, 288 pp, $16.99

In her pre-war notebook, written between 1933 and 1939, Simone Weil wrote “you could not have wished to have been born at a better time than this, when everything has been lost.” Everything—for her, an unusual imprecision. What has been lost?

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In her London notebook, written in 1943—the year of her death—Weil gave a partial answer: “When humanity fell away from a civilization illumined by faith, probably the first thing it lost was the spirituality of labour.” This is the animating theme of The Need for Roots, written over those same months. Simone Pétrement, Weil’s friend and biographer, believed that all of Weil’s London writings belonged to the period between December 1942 and April 1943, when she was admitted to the hospital. Over those four months, she wrote The Need for Roots, essays including ‘What is sacred in every human being?,’ ‘Are we fighting for justice?,’ ‘Essential ideas for a New Constitution,’ ‘This War is a War of Religions,’ ‘On the Abolition of All Political Parties,’ ‘Is there a Marxist Doctrine?’, ‘Theory of Sacraments,’ ‘Concerning the Colonial Problem in its Relation to the Destiny of the French People,’ ‘Notes on Cleanthes, Pherecydes, Anaximander, and Philolaus,’ as well as extensive notebooks, translations of the Upanishads and extensive correspondence, the last continued from her hospital bed until her death in August, 1943. This is a partial list, provided usefully in the introduction by Kate Kirkpatrick to the new Penguin translation of The Need for Roots. “Did she sleep?” asks Kirkpatrick.

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Kirkpatrick’s introduction, which unenviably follows T.S. Eliot’s preface to Arthur Wills’s translation published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952, is valuable primarily for setting Weil’s long, strange book in the immediate context of its production. There is biographical information: It was written in the Mayfair offices of the Fighting France movement in the first months of 1943. It details her contacts with André Philip, the Minister of the Interior for de Gaulle’s government-in-exile, who had given a lecture in New York calling for a new declaration of human rights, which would be a ‘profession of faith’—Weil had attended the lecture before being interviewed by Philip for a job at the Commissariat for the Interior in London. Weil’s relationship to and criticism of personalism, a philosophy particularly associated with Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain, is discussed, as is the work’s complicated relationship with the development of a post-war consensus on universal human rights. This sort of solid intellectual history is particularly welcome with figures like Weil, whose esotericism often allows them to float above history as quasi-prophets. The popularity of Gravity and Grace, the usual entry point to Weil’s corpus, has compounded this problem, being composed of selected extracts from her extensive notebooks with no sense of their dates, context, or interrelation. Her work is often epigrammatic and paradoxical, but she wrote far more frequently in paragraphs than readers of Gravity and Grace would presume. An introduction which deals with biography, intellectual context, and philosophical influences is therefore welcome.

Eliot’s preface worried not at all about such details. It remains, however, good psychological preparation for reading Weil. He is mostly concerned with her character and what it might have to do with her method and what both, in turn, might have to do with what she is saying (posthumously) to Western civilization in the eye-blink of its rebuilding. Kirkpatrick mischaracterizes Eliot when she says he “dismisses” The Need for Roots as “‘prolegomena to politics’ whose author was a genius but whose message is fit for limited consumption by the young and idealistic.” Eliot used “prolegomena to politics” not as a statement of genre; he was simply describing The Need for Roots as the sort of work which politicians would seldom read and would not understand if they did. This was a failing of the political and intellectual establishment, not a limitation of Weil’s. For Eliot, the young and not-yet-settled were best-placed to understand what Weil’s work—indeed, her whole life—sought to communicate: some glimmer of beauty that might enter the soul at the right time and transform it. The Need for Roots would not offer any benefit whatsoever on a political theory reading list. It is a book to be encountered and re-encountered when the reader is disposed to understand it. It requires that particular Weilian virtue: attention, which is nothing less than the capacity to let your entire being be transformed by an encounter with something beautiful and true. Eliot understood Weil’s aesthetic method; like her, he clung to tradition as something far more powerful than nostalgic window-dressing. Tradition could communicate where all other words and forms failed; similarly, form could destroy an idea if presented improperly, preventing it from ever being digested and understood. Weil’s soul was shattered open by George Herbert’s “Love (III).” She knew that the most important political question was how the soul of a peasant could be saved as his body worked and his mind recalled some line from Piers Plowman or a Gospel parable about a sower. These questions do not belong comfortably to modern political theory.

The Need for Roots is full of strange proposals. Weil suggested, as a remedy to industrial alienation, a return to traditional apprenticeships and the Tour de France, lasting until a man was ready to settle down. Then, provided he passed an intelligence test, he would be given a plot of land and machinery for a small workshop to support his family. She suggested to Charles de Gaulle that French nurses be parachuted to the frontlines to heal the wounded, conspicuously risking their lives to demonstrate moral superiority over the merciless Germans and thereby win an aesthetic victory. Charles de Gaulle believed her mad. Undeterred, she wrote a diagnosis of modern civilization and some suggestions as to how the situation might be fixed. Modern civilization, she argued, “is sick from not knowing exactly what place to give to physical labour and those who perform it.” The remedy is a civilization based on the spirituality of work. Why work, specifically? In Genesis, she argued, man excluded himself from obedience. “As punishments, God has chosen work and death. Consequently, work and death, if a man consents to suffer them, constitute a vehicle for attaining the supreme good which is obedience to God.”

Quoting Mein Kampf, Weil highlighted Hitler’s view that “a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole of Nature and that [humanity’s] existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife.” Weil would not have disagreed—she made the same argument in her commentary on the Iliad (“The Iliad, or The Poem of Force”). The miracle of the Iliad is in laying bare this law: “in this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.” Nobody is exempt—she echoed Hobbes when she wrote that the “strong are . . . never absolutely strong; nor are the weak absolutely weak.” Each person is subject to the blunt force of necessity, which is the order of creation. For Hitler, as for Nietzsche, ontological necessity laid the foundation for a Realpolitik wherein the strong legitimately rule over the weak. For Weil, it led in the opposite direction. The Greek genius begun with the Iliad concluded with the Gospels. In the Incarnation and Passion, Christ consented to become subject to necessity and emptied Himself to the extent that God was cut off from God—a geometry of atonement. This geometry is the mechanism by which human nature (which is finite and natural) can come to know God (who is the absolute Good, wholly transcendent). This is the lynchpin of existence—the meeting place of necessity and grace. Weil thought of necessity as a gift left by God so that each soul might learn obedience. The imitation of Christ is exactly this becoming obedient to necessity.

When Weil spoke of a spirituality of labor, she did not mean that work should become painless or even pleasant. She spoke contemptuously of the Roman passiones where martyrs embraced death joyfully, as if grace could grant them the protection from suffering which had not been granted to Christ. Civilization had lost a spirituality of work (a loss which Weil dates to the decline of the medieval guild system) when it became “a means to an end: money.” Wage slavery negated the consent of the worker and thus denied work its spiritual value. “Labour is consent to the order of the universe,” she wrote in her London notebook. In The Need for Roots, she argued that “after freely chosen death, freely chosen physical work is the most perfect form of obedience.” But whereas consent to death is theoretical and abstract until the moment when death arrives, “physical work is a daily death.” Consenting to labor is a spiritual discipline which, day in and day out, increases the proportion of good relative to evil within the human soul. The worker does not need to love his work—he only needs to understand its value so as to be able to consent to its necessity.

Why should the body be necessary to this transformation? This is what separates Weil from the Gnostics and from Descartes. In her essay “Theory of Sacraments,” possibly the last she wrote before her admission to the hospital in April 1943, she asks: “But with the movements and stances of the body able to have objects only here below, how then could this desire [for absolute good; that is, for God] have a passage into the state of reality through the flesh?” She answers: “In order that desire for absolute good pass through the flesh, an object here below must be the absolute good in relation to the flesh, as a sign and by convention.” What follows is a careful and delicate argument, clearer than many of her earlier writings (as if illumined). She argued that when the sacraments are received with a desire for contact with God, belief becomes productive of reality—becomes faith. Faith is the operative consent which allows the good to enter us. From this, Weil concludes that “[c]onsent is only real at the moment when the flesh makes it so by a bodily movement.”

A sacrament is an arrangement that corresponds in a flawless, perfect, way to the dual character of the operation of grace, suffered and consented at the same time, and to the relation of human thought to flesh.

Weil illustrates this essay with parables involving agricultural laborers (in The Need for Roots, she abhors liturgical centralization and recommends that priests in rural parishes focus their preaching particularly on these, so that parishioners internalize a connection between their daily work and the work of salvation). She makes a further connection between sacramental activity and the motionless attention of the soul, which is patience. Obedience, consent, attention, necessity, grace—the full extent of Weil’s thought comes together here. Read together with The Need for Roots, written at the same time or within months of each other, it amounts to a sacramental theory of labor.

In The Need for Roots, Weil wrote that the “particular mission, the vocation of our era, is the constitution of a civilization based on the spirituality of work.” Aspects of this idea, she says, are found in “Rousseau, George Sand, Tolstoy, Proudhon, Marx, in papal encyclicals and elsewhere.” These are “the only original thoughts of our time, the only ones we have not borrowed from the Greeks.” Her understanding of historiography is materialist in the sense that the conditions of a particular historical moment produce the ideas to remedy it—so the greatest degree of uprootedness produces a theory of civilization built on the spirituality of work, which would be ‘the highest degree of rootedness.’ Her thought is always geometrical; this is not the Hegelian Aufhebung. It is the Cross—the meeting of necessity and grace at the center of the universe, a crucifixion of creation. The Cross is the supernatural piercing of materialism. It is the only point of contact between the created world and the transcendent.

The great catastrophe of Western civilization was not the French Revolution or the Enlightenment, as many of her contemporaries believed. Rather, it was the destruction of Languedoc culture in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Romanesque, not the Gothic, was the high point of Christian civilization—the unpolluted beauty of Gregorian chant, Romanesque arches, and Christian Neoplatonism, which she believed may have carried traces of ancient Thracian mystery cults. It is interesting, therefore, that Weil does not make the link between the spirituality of work and Benedictine monasticism. In 1938, she had spent Holy Week and Easter at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes. She was suffering from intense headaches, which would worsen and interfere with her work over the coming years. Nevertheless, she attended the daily offices, where the beauty of the nuns’ ancient chant allowed the thought of the Passion of Christ to “enter into [her] being once and for all.” Had she read the Rule of St. Benedict, where St. Benedict had set down a rhythm of days filled with prayer and manual labor? “When they live by the labor of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks,” he had written. The spirituality of labor is not, as she rightly pointed out, a Greek idea. But neither does it belong to modernity; it is as old as Christian civilization.

“Rootedness is perhaps the most important and least known human spiritual need,” writes Weil. “A human being is rooted through their real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive the treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future.” That these roots ought to be natural is central—Christian civilization can’t be imposed. Post-war reconstruction could not proceed by the enforcement of certain values and institutions. This was everything that Weil detested in the inquisitorial strain of Catholicism which had obliterated her beloved Languedoc culture. This method could only produce uprootedness. Uprooted people uproot people, her dictum prophetically goes. And yet it was necessary for the French people to have contact with their past, which was necessarily a Christian past. The future could only be based on “the treasures inherited from the past and digested, absorbed and recreated by us. Of all the needs of the human soul, there is none more vital than the past.”

As a historian, Weil is a delight. She is a fierce absolutist, demolishing the achievements of the Roman Empire (‘The Great Beast’) like an anti-Dante, clinging to the Greeks, condemning the ‘Hebraic tradition’ to an extent that even her Jewishness has not protected her from accusations of anti-semitism. She was always for the underdog, the troubadour, the unlettered Germanic tribesman whose ritual was snuffed out by a totalitarian Rome. Something as cold as a State cannot be loved—the patriot loves his culture, compatriots, landscape, music, poetry; he loves a set of traditions, lovingly passed down by generations of compatriots. But in modernity States have eaten up the past so that there is nothing left; people have become French, forgotten to be Breton. They have been uprooted. Totalitarianism, what Weil names frequently in her writings as ‘The Great Beast,’ will draw in those who have been uprooted. The spirituality of work is “the only thing big enough to offer to people instead of totalitarian idols. If it is not offered to them in such a way as to make them feel its greatness, they will remain in thrall to the idol.” Writing during the Second World War, Weil saw a great hunger that could only be sated by greatness, whether this be the false greatness of conquest or real greatness, which is of a spiritual order.

How, then, to communicate this? There could be no war propaganda to spur a spiritual transformation of France. Weil began with what she knew, having spent much of her life teaching in (brutally secularist) French state education. “If children are not accustomed to thinking of God, they will become fascists or Communists out of a need to give themselves to something,” she says in The Need for Roots. This does not mean that children must believe in God. Rather, being accustomed to thinking about God means one is accustomed to thinking with the great artistic and intellectual tradition which Christianity shaped in the West. She argues that it’s ludicrous for children to have read Pascal and Lamartine and even Dante and Milton but never opened the Bible. Children should be taught doctrine—as a part of their history, the world of ideas into which they grow. “Above all,” she stresses, this teaching “would seek to make children aware of the beauty it contains.” She goes on:

Contact with Christian beauty, presented simply as beauty to be savoured, would subtly instil spirituality into the mass population, if the country is capable of it, far more effectively than any dogmatic teaching of religious beliefs. The word beauty in no way implies that religious matters should be considered in the manner if aesthetes. Their worldview is sacrilegious. It consists in treating beauty as entertainment, manipulating at it and gazing at it. Beauty is something that is consumed; it is sustenance.

Here is the core of Weil’s program, method and form—the form of her whole life, maybe, lived just outside the Church so as to draw people into it, lived in such extremes as to draw the attention of generation after generation. The form of her writing, its paradoxes and infuriating overstatements and allusive links. Her work has a Straussian quality, hiding its deepest insights between the lines, seeking a form which will convey ideas too dangerous and easily misunderstood to be stated blankly. Indeed, she sounds like Leo Strauss when she says (of propagandistic mottos) that “to discredit such words by throwing them into the public domain without infinite precautions would do irreparable harm and kill any hope that the corresponding thing might appear.” For Weil’s vision—that is, a civilization based on the spirituality of work—to succeed, the idea must gradually seep into people’s minds. These minds already know “that we are suffering from an imbalance due to a purely material development of technology.” The best way to awaken comprehension is to ensure that, in the course of an education, each child encounters the spiritual treasures of their past—the bright genius of minds gone before them, sharing the same land, the same sorts of lives. “There is no other process for learning about the human heart than the study of history combined with life experience, in such a way as they shed light on each other,” she writes.

Her historiographical method is apophatic—this is why she is so attracted to the adjudged heretics and lost love songs of Languedoc, which she returns to again and again as the moment when Christian civilization almost flourished but then was crushed by another manifestation of the Great Beast. “History is a fabric of baseness and cruelty among which a few drops of purity occasionally glimmer . . . . We must seek, if we can, indirect testimonies . . . . To love France, we need to feel it has a past, but we must not love the historical shell of that past. We must love the part that is mute, anonymous, vanished.” (What I would give to tell Simone that one of the most vicious debates in contemporary British historiography is whether the Cathars did or did not, in fact, exist.)

To restore the lost poetry of labor . . . Weil turns to history as the remedy for alienation. The alienated worker is uprooted and, at worst, his soul mangled into affliction. The worker whose work is valuable, dignified, which stands in a tradition (which is a trade), which has its songs and poems . . . then “the suffering that is always related to some extent to the exertion of work becomes the pain that makes the beauty of the world penetrate to the human being’s very core.” This experience cannot be taught. But the economic and cultural environment can be so arranged that such sanctification is possible. In an essay “Concerning the Colonial Problem in its Relation to the Destiny of the French People,” Weil wrote: “it is only the radiance from the spiritual treasures of the past that can induce in the soul that state which is the necessary condition for receiving grace . . . . The loss of the past is equivalent to the loss of the supernatural.”

In another essay, “This war is a war of religions,” Weil wrote that while the nature of mystical transformation makes it inaccessible for the mass of believers, nevertheless “the whole life of an entire people can be infused with a religion that would be entirely oriented towards the mystical.” She says, furthermore, “it is not a new Franciscan order that is required. A monk’s habit or a monastery is a separation. These people have to be in the midst of the masses and touch them without anything intervening.” This is strikingly close to a comment by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre when asked about Rod Dreher’s popular prescription for Christian life, The Benedict Option, which had been influenced by the closing words of MacIntyre’s landmark After Virtue. “What is very interesting about St Benedict,” he said, “is that he quite inadvertently created a new set of social forms.” MacIntyre explained—it’s worth finding the whole thing and reading it from him—that monks, necessarily, can’t reproduce themselves, so have to exist in close symbiotic relationships with nearby villages. The villages supply novices and exchange goods; over time, the monastery becomes a local centre for education, literary production, pastoral care, etc. “So this is not a withdrawal from society . . . . When I said we need a new St Benedict, I was suggesting we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.”

Why this moment, when everything has been lost? Weil understood that there would be a brief window after the war when the architecture of civilization could be reinvented (as it was; one wonders what the world would look like today if the architects had been not modernists but converts to the Romanesque). Weil’s apophaticism made her hopeful in ways that realist political thinkers never can be. The cross can’t be dislodged. Grace and necessity meet at the gates of hell. Then, as now, there is no politician willing to take such risks. But culture and aesthetics are ever-expanding mission ground.